


The Woman with No Name

by Mmmph



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Light Bondage, Nudity, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2018-11-08 06:43:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 46,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11076165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mmmph/pseuds/Mmmph
Summary: Laying low on a ranch in West Texas, McCree is kidnapped by the notorious hacker and Talon operative, Sombra. Once together, though, the two learn they might have more in common than they thought.





	1. Chapter 1

He sat on the back porch with his snakeskin boots perched atop the old wooden railing that trimmed it. He watched the mountains out West, the way the clouds lumbered though the peaks and the day’s last light set the horizon ablaze. He sipped at his beer and took a long swallow and breathed deep of the fresh Texas air. The only sound in the world was the wind whispering across all that red earth, and it was quiet enough to fall asleep to. He leaned back in his chair and tipped the wide brim of his hat down to shade his eyes.

His lids were just getting heavy when a trio of noises jerked him back awake. Feet scuffling dirt, the creak of a floorboard, weight layering itself beside him in an empty chair. He peaked from the shade of his hat at the nothingness beside him, studying it. His good hand slid under his poncho and gripped his revolver. His thumb played at the hammer as he watched the ghost that wasn’t there. The wind had ceased blowing from that direction.

McCree nodded and sat back and spat. He kept his hold on the polished grips of his revolver. The next sip of his beer was joyless. It was all of a sudden far too bitter.

“Well,” he began with a sigh, “Ain’t this the part where you’re s’pposed to say somethin’ about how you’ve been here all along?”

The ghost didn’t answer. McCree sat and watched the emptiness. Something cold snapped in his ear, something electronic, and then pieces of the ghost were assembling themselves. Square after square formed up, shedding the chameleon’s camouflage, conjuring the person inside.

The process had started and stopped just as quick and then the ghost was gone and that hacker of equal parts notoriety and myth sat beside him in the flesh. Copper skin, violet eyeshadow, eyebrows shaped too perfect not to be drawn on. Her hair shaved down to nothing but stubbled patterns on one side, a heavy cascade of dark locks on the other. Her coat was purple leather and it creaked in the elbow when she lifted a gloved hand and waved to him. Five sharp instruments jabbed the air where her fingertips should’ve been.

“Hola, McCree.”

Muh-Cree. That was how she said it. Like it was two words instead of one. He eyed her. He spat.

“You don’t look surprised to see me.”

“Why should I?” He tipped a swig of beer down his gullet and faced the sunset again. “Can’t stay hidden forever. I knew somebody’d be lookin’ for me. When you have a talent for killing like mine, darlin’, someone’s always lookin’.”

“It’s a nice place. Homey. Yours?”

“I rent.”

She nodded. Her eyes peered carefully into the shadowed nook of his poncho where his hand still laid.

“You wouldn’t pull a gun on little old me, would you McCree? I heard you’re a vaquero. A cowboy, as you say.”

“Yeah? Where’d you hear that?”

“In your voice and in your hat and in your poncho and in your boots. That’s who told me.”

He spat.

“Are you here alone, McCree?”

“You know I am. You wouldn’t have pulled yourself out of that little stealth camo of yours if you hadn’t done the place over once or twice.”

“True.”

“Then why’d you ask?”

“I wanted to see if you’d lie. You didn’t. Good for you.”

“What’s your name?”

“You know who I am.”

“I know you call yourself ‘Sombra’. And I also know that ain’t no real name. If you’re ‘Sombra’, I guess that’d make me ‘Doc Holliday’.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

“My name isn’t important, McCree. I need to know who you’re working for at the moment. Let’s start there.”

“Who am I working for? Well, guy’s about six feet tall, brown hair, helluva shot with a revolver. He thinks too little and talks too much and he’s a real asshole in the morning before he’s had his coffee. Goes by the name of ‘Jesse McCree’. Or maybe it’s ‘Muh-Cree’. Not sure, I’ve heard it said that way before.”

She smiled at that. It seemed sincere enough. “Ah, yes. Self-employed. You’re the vigilante, correct? Mercenario?”

He tipped his hat.

“That’s good. We don’t want anyone to come looking for you.”

Beneath his poncho, his thumb reeled back on the hammer of his gun.

“Relax, vaquero. I’m not here to kill you. I’m here to kidnap you. And I’m not exactly alone.”

Sombra snatched his beer from the railing and emptied the contents into the dirt beyond the porch. She tossed it up in the air over the backyard. The little bottle sailed up and pinned to the pale blue sky and hung suspended at its apex. It shattered and pieces of glass were still raining to the yard by the time the sound of the sniper rifle’s shot caught up. McCree narrowed his gaze into the hills up North. Somewhere in those pockets of endless shadows must’ve been the spider. 

“Talon, then,” he said and spat deliberately. “I was wonderin’ on whose buck you were sent out here on. You’re with the spider. No one else could’ve made that shot.”

“Not even you?”

“Well, maybe me. But I’m pretty damn sure I wasn’t the one who took it. Now what in the hell does Talon want with me?”

“They want you indisposed. They want you all bundled up and stashed away when your friends in Overwatch, inevitably, come knocking. In short, McCree, they don’t want to be looking down the barrel of that infamous gun of yours. You said it yourself. You’re a vigilante. A mercenary. Well, a mercenary is a product, and they want your particular product off the market for awhile.”

“You keep sayin’ ‘they’ like you ain’t one of ‘em.”

A grin curled her shapely lips. “I’m not. I’m more like you, McCree. I go where I’m needed.”

“For the right price?”

“For whatever gets me closer to truth.”

A breath of wind sent a tumbleweed rolling down the dirt path beside the house. It rolled on leaving a long trailing shadow to the east, and above it the sky was warming down to a nice mauve shade of twilight that signaled the coming dusk. McCree stretched his back and his long legs and eyed the little bits of broken glass littering his yard that shimmered under the day’s final glow like constellations.

“You owe me a beer,” he said.

Sombra unfolded herself from the chair and drew up beside him with her hands on her hips. “Maybe I’ll steal you down to Mexico and show you what a real beer tastes like sometime, hermano.” 

“Well, I’d reckon I’d appreciate that much kindly, hermana.”

They held one another’s eyes as the world grew black around them.

“So how is this going to happen? You gonna stuff me in a sack? Throw a net over my head? Jab me with a tranquilizer?”

“My instructions were to throw you in a trunk locked up in a pair of handcuffs. But I figured you’re a cowboy. You’d want the real thing.” She fished into a satchel at her hip and drew a long length of white cotton rope.

McCree watched it dangle before his eyes. “You know, usually a fella would have to pay to get a lady pretty as you to tie him up.”

“For being so charming and sweet, I’ll do you for free, McCree. Now throw that gun you’ve been fondling since I sat down into the dirt and get up.”

He could feel Widowmaker’s well-trained eye on him across all those hundreds of yards to the North, daring him to make a move. He did not oblige her. He tossed his gun as Sombra instructed, stood up, and allowed himself to be spun around and his hands to be snatched up and drawn together behind him at the small of his back. Sombra bound him tightly, wrapping and cinching his wrists till he couldn’t move them at all. She took him by the elbow and dragged him off the porch. His boots nearly tangled and spilled him down till he caught his balance by leaning into his captor’s shoulder. She steered him around the side of the house and out front where a sleek little two-seater was parked against the curb. A wave of her gloved hand with its dagger-tipped fingers unlocked and opened the trunk as they drew near.

“You know, darlin’, you could just sit me up front so we could better get to know one another.”

“Just shut up for once, McCree. Actually, that reminds me, _darling_.” She retrieved a bandana from her satchel and pulled it taught between her fists, snapping it twice crisply. Her grin told him what it was for.

“Is a gag really necessary?”

“With a mouth like yours? Absolutely.”

She tied it around his lower face, cleaving the center between his lips and teeth so that he was forced to bite down on it and shut up. She knotted it and stepped before him to admire his silenced visage.

“Comfy?”

“Mmmnf…”

“Perfect.”

She laid a hand on his shoulder and shoved. He went stumbling over the edge of the car’s backside and spilled into the trunk. Sombra was generous enough to help him stuff his legs in behind him, and when he was laid down in a tight ball wedged between the narrow walls, she waved goodbye and slammed the lid shut. 

When it opened again twenty minutes later, McCree felt as if he’d been stashed in an oven. The day’s last heat simmered through the thin walls of the trunk and had started to cook him. His undershirt and jeans clung to his sweaty skin and his poncho wrangled around his neck as if it were the hand of the devil himself reaching up to strangle him. Graciously, Sombra dipped herself into the trunk and fetched him up under the arms and dragged him out. He planted his booted feet in the dirt and reveled in the cool night air breezing across them as they stood, captor and captive, beneath the shadows of the northern hills.

“Sorry, cowboy,” she said, wrestling the poncho from around his neck and dabbing his brow with it to clear his eyes. She tossed it back in the trunk and closed the lid.

He looked at her face painted silver under the moonlight, the shapes of her lips and her cheekbones. The half of her head with all her hair billowed like a flag at attention. Her eyes were two dark pools watching back. When she moved it was with a supple grace that highlighted her curvy figure pressed tight against her form-fitting attire. McCree made fists behind his back. His restraints had never felt so tight.

She took him by the elbow and led him off. Their destination loomed overhead in an aperture curved out of a steep rise of rocky hill. There in a gaping maw overlooking the valley, a long one-story cabin sat dormant in the darkness, oblong windows curtained over and faintly aglow with dull orange light. A wooden staircase had been erected in twin sets, leading first straight up and then around a bend to the cabin itself. McCree set his feet on the first of the stairs and braced himself for the long climb with Sombra’s hand gently gripped at his forearm to keep him under control. 

After the ascent he was taken inside breathless. Sombra set the electronic locks of the door behind them with another wave of her gloved hand and then took him through an empty parlor and into a smaller bedroom. There he was seated in a wooden chair beside the bed and the woman bound him more securely, his ankles to the chair legs and his torso wrapped to its backing. She towered over him admiring her work again. Her finger danced playfully beneath his chin till he reared his head back.

“You’re a handsome man in all that bondage, McCree.” She took his hat off and tossed it to the bed like a frisbee. “Hope you’re comfortable, amigo.”

He eyed her, writhing against his ropes to test their hold. Their hold, as it turned out, was pretty damned firm. His gag bit sharply into the corner of his lips.

“Mmn hnf mmhhm mmm.”

“What was that, cowboy?”

“Mmh hmmn mmmnnn…”

She grinned.

The bedroom had a second door nestled between the southern windows. Sombra sauntered to it and threw it back on its hinges. The lamplight from inside layered a rectangle of soft orange light on a terraced balcony beyond. It revealed only part of the sniper, but it was enough to confirm her identity. Her long legs and high-heeled feet came exposed in the light and McCree watched closely as it climbed a bit higher and etched the definition of a shapely behind leaned over the railing. Sombra’s legs planted beside Widowmaker’s and their shadowed voices drifted faintly inside.

“Any witnesses?”

“Of course not.”

“He’s secured?”

“Bound and gagged. How much more secured do you want him?”

“I have to leave tonight.”

“Oh?”

“The fly is on the move. The spider follows.”

“And what am I supposed to do?”

A moment of quiet.

“I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

“Grounded then. Is that the best use of my talents?”

“I have my orders. You have yours.”

“Si, amiga… it would certainly seem that way.”

The sniper’s feet clicked and clacked down the balcony in their high-heels, returning the killer to that great endless black sea of the night world beyond. Sombra’s legs lingered in the light a moment as the other woman departed and the sounds of her retreat were lost in the high shrill cry of the hill’s wind. When Sombra returned to the room, her hands were planted firmly atop her hips and her teeth worked at her lower lip fastidiously. The lapis jewels that were her eyes settled on McCree.

“I need a shower. Can you be a good little cowboy and sit there quietly?”

He nodded.

“Muy bien, amigo. Mucho apreciado.”

She moved past him and ran her hand over his head to let her fingers trail lines back through his unkempt hair. She disappeared outside the door and left McCree alone. He sat stil awhile, meditating on all that’d happened. He tested his binds again. A pull here, a twist there. The rope bit his skin and reminded him he wasn’t going anywhere. He worked his jaw against his gag.

Sombra came back somewhere around thirty minutes later. She’d shed her stealthy clothing and gear since he’d seen her last and sauntered into the room in dark purple panties and a pair of flip-flops and nothing else. Her hair was tied up in a white towel nesting atop her head. Her bare breasts swayed with each step, dark brown nipples crowning either one. Her skin was smooth copper still damp from her shower. It glistened in the soft touch of the lamplight.

McCree swallowed down a throat gone to sandpaper and fidgeted in his binds. They seemed to tighten up on him all at once. His pants felt two size too small. He couldn’t not watch her.

She went to the bed and slipped out of her flip-flops to crawl barefoot onto the mattress. She sat cross-legged up beside the pillows and reached for the nightstand where a bottle of water and a wrapped granola bar waited. She peeled the wrapper back and bit down and chewed thoughtfully. She chased it with a long swallow of water. Her throat pulsed as she drank, her breasts heaving every-so-slightly with each gulp. McCree’s breath was shallow in his chest as he stared.

Sombra finished half the granola bar before folding the wrapper over the center and setting it back on the nightstand. A last drink of water and the bottle joined it. Then she sat dabbing crumbs from her lips and licking them from her fingers. She stretched her legs out long in front of her and fanned her toes and ran her hands against her thighs. She sat back and watched him watching her.

“Pervertido,” she accosted him with a smile.

“Mmmnf.” He was grateful to have something to bite down on.

She retrieved her bottle of water again and scooted onto the edge of bed. There she leaned forward to grab hold of his chair and scooted him closer. When she’d finished, he was between her legs, facing directly into her. His eyes moved from her face to her breasts to her belly and to her legs, where all that brown skin of her thighs was funneling his vision down to a direct and amorous point. She worked his gag out of his mouth long enough to give him a few swallows of water but had him muzzled tight again before he could talk.

“There. That should cool you off, McCree.”

“Hmmf.”

“Silencio.”

She fetched his hat from the bed and yanked it down over his head, tipping the brim down deep across his eyes to keep him from staring at her any further. 

“Buenas noches, vaquero.”

The bedsprings creaked and the little bit of light he could spy from under his hat was snuffed out and the room was swallowed up in darkness. After a bit, his eyes adjusted and he could see the silver streaks coming in off the moonlit windows throwing lines across the bed. He tilted his head back to get a last look at her. She’d covered up in a thin sheet by then, but at the top of the bed her untoweled hair splashed around her head sunk in its pillow and the sharp blades of her bare shoulders angled prettily away from her back. At the other end a long bare leg had poked sensuously out from under the covers and lay like a haunch of seasoned meat ready to be devoured, the light brown sole of her naked foot shone like a spotlight against the silver kiss of the moon.

McCree dropped his chin to his chest, eager to be rid of the sight of her. Captured was one thing, bound up and gagged another. But to be tortured with the sight of a naked beauty sprawled before him like some celestial painting gifted down to the mortals was just too much. It was just too damned much.

He closed his eyes and let sleep find him. His last thoughts were of Sombra’s breasts, of how they might feel cupped in the palms of his hands.


	2. Chapter 2

He woke with the barrel of a rifle beneath his chin. It raised up and he raised up with it till his head was tilted back and he was looking down his nose and up the rifle into the eyes of a spider with blue skin. Visor lifted up over her brow, bulbous red lenses protruding in every direction, sharp nose and sharp jawline and a sharp look to match it all together. McCree blinked and chewed his gag and made himself come awake. The room was aglow with pale morning light.

Widowmaker studied him. She tipped his hat back to get a better look then moved herself beside the bed and stood looking down at the curvy woman slumbering beneath the covers. She prodded Sombra’s ribs with the rifle’s nozzle. Sombra groaned and rolled herself half out of the covers and sat bare-chested and disoriented starting up at her disturber.

“ _Basta_ ,” she muttered and swatted the barrel aside. She knuckled her eye sockets and stretched herself catlike across the bed, arching her back and pulling her breasts flat to her chest. She threw back the covers and worked herself to the mattress edge to sit. When her eyes found McCree’s, she smiled and said, “Buenos dias, vaquero. Duerme bien?”

“Put something on,” Widowmaker said.

“I have something on.” She hooked a finger under the waistband of her panties and let it snap crisply against her flesh. Widowmaker watched her expressionless. Sombra sighed and stood and slipped her feet into her flip-flops. She retrieved a black T-shirt from the closet and wormed herself through and the beauty of her chest was hidden away, only curves shaping against the dark fabric then. McCree’s breaths came just a bit easier.

“Better?”

Widowmaker said nothing.

“Well, did the spider catch herself a fly last night?”

Widowmaker looked at McCree. “Not in front of him.”

“Who? El vaquero? He’s harmless as a little prairie dog.” Sombra laid her hand atop his head and scrunched her fingers through his hair.

“Outside.”

Sombra sighed. “Si. Tu eres la patrona.”

They went out onto the balcony and closed the door and whatever conversation they might’ve had was lost to McCree. He sat patiently in his bondage, testing the ropes with a few pulls to see if the night had loosened them any. It hadn’t. Were he a man ten years younger a night slept all tied up in a chair might’ve not done much damage. But he wasn’t that man any longer, and every joint and muscle he had felt stiff. The bandana between his teeth tasted like damp cardboard. There were rope burns around his wrists. He had to piss something fierce.

Sombra returned alone and, as she had last night, the spider must’ve crept back off to her web.

“How are you doing, McCree. You don’t look so happy.”

He stared at her.

“Oh, right. Sorry, vaquero. Forgot you can’t talk.” She sauntered to him and stood shifting her weight from foot to foot. Her legs were long and bare beneath her panties. She leaned close to reach around the back of his head and he felt the warmth of her breasts through the fabric of her shirt as it pressed against his face. She removed his gag.

“Yuck,” she said, dangling the damp bandana between her fingers. She took it into the next room and McCree heard a faucet start and stop. When she came back, the bandana looked scrubbed clean and she laid it on the windowsill to dry in the sun.

“I’d thank you for doing that,” he said, “but if you’re cleaning it I guess that means its gonna find its way back in my mouth sooner or later.”

“You guess correct, McCree.” She grinned broadly, showing off a set of straight white teeth. “How are you feeling?”

“Stiff.”

“Well you can’t blame me for that anymore, vaquero. I’m wearing a shirt again.”

“You know what I mean. I been roped down all night. And I’ll need to make a trip to that bathroom of your’s sooner rather than later.”

She drummed her fingers against her arms.

“Okay, McCree. I’ll solve all your problems at once. See how nice I am?”

She started by locking him up in a pair of handcuffs. The cold steel closed over his wrists and then Sombra went to work on all the little knots she’d tied to bind him in place. His ropes fell away piece by piece till he was free, sans the cuffs, and able to stand. He arched his back and it fired off like a gunshot. He paced the room getting circulation back in his legs and walking out the tightness in his muscles. Sombra watched him with her sly grin. He stopped pacing and watched back.

“You gonna take the bracelets off so I can take a leak or what?”

“Bracelets. I like that. Come here. Let me show you the way.”

She hooked her arm under his and steered him out of the room, into the hall, and around the corner where a small bathroom waited with its open door. She nudged him inside and walked in behind him. She lifted the toilet seat. Before he knew what was happening, she’d unzipped his fly and reached inside his pants. She worked his manhood out and turned around. McCree had to piss too badly to bother thinking about what’d just happened. He let go.

“Grande polla, vaquero. Muy impresionado.”

“Muchas gracias,” he said as he drained all the tension out of his body. He shook himself dry and nudged her and Sombra put him back inside his pants and zipped him up. She washed her hands.

Back in the bedroom she sat him on the edge of the bed but didn’t bind him any further. She uncapped her water bottle and took a drink and then held it to his lips. He swallowed graciously, washing out the taste of the gag and cooling his dry throat. Sombra went to the long table at the far side of the room and knelt beside the miniature refrigerator tucked away there. She retrieved bread and ham and cheese and another bottle of water and set them all up on the table to make sandwiches. As she worked, McCree watched her rear end. Her panties didn’t hide much. Each cheek was a smooth flank of copper flesh and he figured he’d much rather feast on that than the sandwiches. She knelt and stood and all that slick skin pulled tight and went soft again. At a point, he had to look away. The tension he’d shed in the bathroom was being replaced with a different sort of tension. Something raw and animalistic. He thought of younger days, herding cattle on his friend’s farm, and that did the trick in cooling him right off.

She returned with a sandwich thick with meat and cheese and sat herself beside him on the bed. She took a bite, chewed, and then held it to his mouth. McCree tore a piece out of the crater she’d left with his teeth. They devoured the entire sandwich that way in a see-saw act, back and forth.

After the food was gone, Sombra stood and brushed crumbs from her shirt. She used the palm of her hand to sweep the crumbs from McCree’s beard and lips as well, then fetched the bottle of water and gave them each a long drink. She swapped the water for a bottle of beer in the fridge and went out to the balcony and set it on the banister there. She stood awhile, looking awfully pretty in the morning light, then came back in and took McCree by the arm and led him outside with her.

There were two chairs angled towards one another. She sat him in one and herself in the other. McCree breathed deep of the fresh air, cooler up here in the hills then it would be down in the valley. He looked out over the banister and watched the green earth roll away from him till he spotted his little rental ranch in the South. It looked awful small and far away set under all that cloudless powder blue sky. Further down the way, the distant city of El Paso sketched a scraggy line off the horizon. He watched it, a cool breeze setting his hair and beard dancing alike.

Sombra sipped at her beer.

“How about one of them for me?”

She eyed him over the rim of the bottle, hiding her smirk beyond the murky glass.

“Normally, I’d say you don’t let your captives drink. But if I recall correctly, I do owe you one from yesterday.”

“I reckon you do.”

Her smile broadened. She disappeared into the house and returned with a second beer. She set it on the banister before him and reclaimed her seat.

He watched beads of condensation streak down the glass. “Not gonna be easy to enjoy that with my hands cuffed behind me.”

“Tell me when you want a drink, vaquero, and I’ll help you have one.”

“I want a drink.”

She helped him have one.

They sat under the morning sun sipping at beers and watching the world turn like a pair of old friends. At a point, Sombra leaned deeper into her chair and slipped out of her flip-flops and draped her bare feet over McCree’s knee, one ankle over the other. He looked at them, watching the fine high arch of her insteps as she wagged them playfully.

“Pretty feet.”

“Gracias. I like to think so.”

“You wouldn’t be trying to seduce me there, would ya, darlin’?”

“With my _feet_?”

“With your feet and beer. And the fact you still ain’t got no damned pants on.”

“I like to be comfortable when I’m stuck on babysitting duty, _darling_. Nothing more.” She sipped her drink. “Besides, you aren’t my type.”

“No?”

“Nope.”

“What’s your type then?”

“Something else.”

McCree leaned back in his own chair and kicked his boots up on the banister beside his beer. He had to shift about to get comfortable with his hands cuffed, but he eventually settled in to a pretty good spot ripe for some sky-watching. Thunderheads moving in from the East, fixing to spoil the prettiness of the day. A big gray canvas coming up right behind them.

“Where’d your partner run off to?”

“She’s not my ‘partner’. She’s…” Sombra drank. “A bit of a perra.”

“Want to know what I think?”

“What do you think, McCree?”

“I think she’s in El Paso. Sittin’ up nice and pretty in some bell tower or loft, lookin’ down the scope of her rifle and waitin’ for someone important to line up just right so she could do him in. Either that or she’s out over the Rio Grande, down South in your country. Who’s she lookin’ to kill, anyway? Some Mexican politician? A diplomat? War general?”

Sombra grinned.

“I take that as meaning you ain’t tellin’ me shit.”

“Correcto.”

He nodded slow. “That’s why y’all dropped in my place and grabbed me. Someone real close to here is about to die. Someone important. And Overwatch or the government or, hell, I don’t know, _some_ body would’ve contact ole McCree lookin’ for help. But instead of helping, I’m all tied up here on this porch being kept as your personal footstool. If I’m right, you just keep on grinnin’.”

She did.

“Yeah, I figured as much.” He looked out to El Paso again. It looked very far away to a man in bondage. Might as well’ve been a million miles. If he closed his eyes he could hear the gunshot, trailing behind the spider’s bullet, seeking out its target. He could see a splash of blood like red paint fall on a sidewalk or a car seat or a building wall. He could smell tears and sorrow on the faces and souls of those who’d been left behind the mark. He grimaced. “You’re in with a bad lot, darlin’. A real bad lot.”

“They don’t scare me.”

“Yeah, well maybe they should. Gimme a drink.”

She gave him one, and he took a long couple of swallows before signaling her to take the bottle from his lips. Alcohol tunneled crisply down his throat and hit his belly just right.

“You just watch your ass, honey. That’s all I’m sayin’.”

“I didn’t know you cared so much, McCree. I’m flattered.”

“Don’t go crawlin’ up your own ass, darlin’, I just know what sort of breed Talon is. I knew… well, one of ‘em. Knew him for a long time now.” His shooting hand clutched behind his back for a revolver that wasn’t there. “Shit. Gimme the last of that beer.”

After he’d emptied the bottle they sat there in silence for awhile as the thunderheads drew closer from the East. Faintly, distantly, the guttural bellow of a storm cried out to signal the world of its coming.

“Look, McCree.” Sombra pointed to the sky. The sun was at its apex, just about ready to be swallowed up by a cloud. “Look where the sun is.”

“Yeah I see it. What’s your point?”

“It’s high noon.”

He stared at her. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“Just an observation, vaquero.” But he saw the hint of a smirk trying to break at the corner of her mouth. Watching her try to hold it in reminded him of how damned pretty she was. He looked away.

Another growl from the East. A slight dimming of the world, like a blanket laid over a lightbulb.

“What’s your name,” he asked.

“You still think I’d tell you?”

“Worth tryin’.”

“My name is Sombra, vaquero. If you must know, I had another name, but that was a long, long time ago. In some other’s woman’s life. Some naive little girl’s. That person is long dead.” She narrowed her eyes into the horizon. The wind billowed her hair. “Sombra is all that remains.”

“Checkered past, huh?”

“What does that mean?”

“Sort of like, well, there’s a lot of bad stuff behind ya.”

“Then yes. I have the ‘checkered past’, McCree.”

“Figured. You ever hear the sayin’ ‘your past always finds a way of catchin’ up with ya’? If whatever’s behind you has chased you into the arms of Talon, darlin’, you better figure out a way to stop running right quick.”

She shifted her weight in her seat. “I wonder if your gag’s dry yet. You were right yesterday when you said you talk too much.”

“Sensitive subject, darlin’?”

“Shut up, McCree. I’m warning you. I’ll gag you with a wet bandana if I have to.”

“Alright, alright. Jus’ hold your damn horses and calm down.”

“What’s ‘hold your horses’?”

“Means ease up, honey.”

“Si? Then I have a saying too, vaquero. It goes ‘No jodas conmigo’. Want to know what it means?”

“That’s alright. I’ll use my imagination.”

“You’ll shut up is what you’ll do.”

“That too.”

“Bueno.”

Then they both froze. Sombra’s hand reached for his mouth and clamped over it to keep him quiet, but McCree didn’t need the aid. He’d heard the same thing she had. Footsteps coming up that ungodly long flight of stairs winding its way from the base of the hills to the cabin’s front door. A board creaked. Another, closer this time. Somewhere East, the world rumbled.

“Don’t make a sound,” Sombra whispered and McCree nodded.

She let go of his mouth and padded down the length of the balcony on the tips of her bare feet. She peaked around the corner, a ghost that didn’t need a cloaking device to be invisible. She stood still as stone, one with the wall, then hurried back on lifted toes. She fell to her knees beside a bench across from their chairs and her hand scrambled blindly under the bench’s belly. The sound of adhesive tearing filled the air and Sombra rose picking tape away form a little black pistol.

McCree kept his voice low. “Who is it?”

“Don’t know. Not Widow. And no one else knows we’re here.” She looked at him gravely. “Tell me the truth, McCree. Do you have anything to do with this?”

“No. Now uncuff me. Don’t give me that look. Even with a little cheap piece like that one there, I’m the best damned shot this side of the Rio Grande, honey. You’d better believe it. Give me the gun. I’ll cover you.”

She looked between him and the open balcony door of the apartment, where a noise began creeping through the windows. She cursed under her breath and looked at the gun.

“Come on. Get the bracelets off and give me that damned thing.”

“ _Mierda!_ ” She fished the handcuff key out of the waistband of her panties and sat his lap. She reached around and unlocked him, but the moment she had she wrestled him hands in front of his belly and locked them right up tight again.

“Really?”

“Shut up.” She shoved the pistol grip into his waiting palm. “I’m going in. You’d better be a man of your word, vaquero.”

“My word’s all I got in this world, darlin’.” He looked the pistol over. “Shit this thing’s cheap. Nine millimeter? What am I supposed to do? Tickle ‘em with it?”

She put a finger to her lips and crept to the door and leaned around to spy inside. She motioned him to follow behind her as she padded forth. McCree got a comfortable grip on the pistol, as comfortable as he could with cuffed hands, and stayed on her heels.

She’d only just gotten inside when it happened. A black blur swept into the room and collide with her and the two went tumbling down all tangled up in one another. McCree leveled the pistol and trained the nozzle on the stranger. Sombra slipped out of her attacker’s arms and rolled smoothly away, but by the time she uncoiled herself the black shape was up with her, slipping around her side like some primordial shadow conjured out of the dark itself. It took her waist in one arm and wrapped her neck with the other.

It was a machine. An omnic. McCree needed only to look into the glowing red orifice of what constituted as its eye to know as much. Its limbs hung from mechanical joints. It was naked in its slate black armored plating. It appeared to be choking the life out of Sombra.

McCree took aim.

“Darlin’, if you don’t mind, could you move yourself just a bit to the right?”

Sombra’s face was all anguish. She grit her teeth and make a choked sound and threw herself to the right like he’d asked and McCree blew the omnic’s electronic brains across the wall with two well-aimed shots. Two because, well, it was a damned 9mm after all. The machine reared back on its metal heels and swung its arms and went down against the wall and sat there transmogrified into a black trash can.

There was a feeling in his gut still. A gunslinger’s instinct. It had kept him alive for almost four decades, and so he’d learn to trust it. He lowered to a crouch and stalked into the adjacent hall. At its end, the last flight of stairs could be seen cresting outside the open cabin door. McCree laid himself flat on his belly, smooth as polished spurs on a fresh set of boots. He set his elbows just right and lay with the pistol trained on those stairs. The world swam away and left nothing but his focus and the steady rhythm of his heart thumping against the wooden planks beneath him. His hands did not shake. His eyes did not blink. Thunder grumbled from the East. The storm was here.

A black omnic head rose and McCree made it explode like he had the other. Two shots, a quick feathering of the trigger. Metal tumbling down stairs. Electronics going haywire. All that noise of death and chaos lost in another bellow of thunder. A gun pressed to the back of his head.

“Darlin’ that better be you.”

“It’s me. Give me the gun, McCree.”

“There could be more.”

“I’ve got my machine pistol now. If there’s more, I’ll handle it. Drop the gun.”

He dropped the gun. His hands felt a whole lot more empty without it. She snatched it away and then uncuffed him, pried his arms around behind him, and recuffed him tightly at the small of his back. She left him locked up there on the floor as she hurried down the corridor and stepped outside, still clad in only panties and a t-shirt. It was quiet for a while, but McCree wasn’t worried. His gunslinger’s instinct had receded back to whatever warrior’s depth inside him it came from. The threat was over.

Sombra returned with her fingers pressed to an earpiece. She was speaking some fiery Spanish to whoever was listening. McCree wasn’t nearly fluent enough in her language to keep up, but the tone was pretty damned clear. Anger and nerves with a healthy side of indignation. She stomped past him as if he wasn’t anything more than a floor rug. He got himself turned over and sat up leaned against the wall, watching her stampede. She stepped into a pair of jeans and her flip-flops and collected things from the nightstand beside the bed that McCree couldn’t see. Her machine pistol went inside her waistband. She pulled her shirt over it to conceal it.

“I take it we’re leavin’,” McCree said as she fetched the bandana from the windowsill and hooked an arm under his to hoist him to his feet. She hurried him down the corridor.

“Si.”

“They were omnics.”

“Si.”

“Coming after Talon?”

“Not sure. Stop talking.”

“I can do that. You don’t need to gag me.”

“I won’t gag you if you shut your mouth when I tell you to. Entiende usted?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

“Bueno.”

They hurried down the twin flights of endless stairs and by the time they hit earth, the rain had found them. A gray caul layered over the sky and cold drops beat against their flesh and heads. McCree listened to it drumming the brim of his hat. It calmed him in a way.

Sombra took him to her little two seater and opened the passenger door and slid the seat forward. Behind the seats was a small compartment for storage purposes.

“If you do what I say when I say it, I’ll put you in there instead of the trunk. Bien?”

“Fair enough.”

She helped him clamber in. It wasn’t exactly a spacious resort, but it was world’s better than the hot oven that was the trunk. He bent his knees to fit and sat cuffed and obedient, eager not to raise the woman’s ire and find himself trunked or gagged. She slid the seat to its proper position and found her way to the other side. She started the engine and got them out of there in a hurry. Dust rose in a beige cloud on their heels as she sped down the dirt road South, then hooked them onto the main highway westward bound. Towards El Paso.

McCree lay back on the floor and listened to the engine purr and the rain dance delicately across the rooftop. He’d destroyed two omnics back there. One way or another now, he and his captor were in this thing together.

They drove on for the city, and whatever might come next.


	3. Chapter 3

Midnight in El Paso. McCree watched the city roll by splayed out on the window above him where he lay flat and cuffed on the floor of the car. The world had been a dark and quiet sprawl on the road in. That had been exchanged since for neon lights and barking dogs and the hustle and bustle of a city still breathing long since the sun had abandoned it. Signs spoke to him in reflected light upon the glass. Liquor stores and hotels and movie theaters and other liquor stores. The further the city drew them in, the closer they drove towards that black beating heart at its core, the din grew and the air staled and McCree longed to be back on his little ranch out East with his boots back up on the railing of his porch.

Sombra turned them in somewhere and killed the engine. Looked like a parking lot from where McCree lay squinting out the window above him. His captor leaned into the back and looked down.

“Necesitas algo de la tienda?”

“What?”

“A store, McCree. I’m going in. Do you need anything?”

“What kind of store?”

“The kind that sells things. Apurarse, idiota _._ ”

“Well, after shootin’ some heads off, I usually like a cigar.”

“Cigarro?”

“Si, amiga. I’d appreciate that a good deal.”

She looked at him with her face all blanketed in shadows. Even in the dark, just the shape of her was alluring. “I’ll see what they have. Just keep your mouth shut back there, McCree, and don’t move.”

“Wasn’t plannin’ on it, honey.”

She left and McCree did as instructed. He lay still and watched the window across from him and saw a stand of dark apartment buildings huddled together shivering against the coming storm. A light rain was already beating the car hood. They’d outran most of the storm’s real fury, but it was catching up quick. The world would be shaking in its boots within the hour. 

When Sombra came back a few minutes later she had a plastic bag with her. She sat it in the middle compartment and got them started up again and moving before she dug in and tossed something back to him. A cellophane-wrapped cigar landed on his chest.

“Gracias. Ain’t gonna be easy to smoke with my hands cuffed, though. Where exactly are you taking us anyway? You know, I know El Paso pretty well. If you sit me up there in the front, maybe-”

“Stop talking, McCree.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

They pulled into an alley not long after. Sombra got out and worked him out with her, tucking McCree’s cigar into his breast pocket for him. They stood together in a narrow channel shadowed between two brick buildings at least ten stories high. A drizzle accompanied them. Sombra took him under the arm and walked him to a door that wasn’t locked and hurried him inside. They climbed many stairs that wound like coiled rope up into a high level of the building and then left the stairwell and entered an apartment. Long room with a low ceiling, cloaked in darkness, two windows and a bathroom. McCree was sat down in a chair and Sombra examined the place. She peaked behind the curtains and went into the bathroom and came out to look under the bed and then stood in the middle of it all with her hands on her hips nibbling on her bottom lip.

“That’s a bad habit, you know.”

The dark recesses of her eyes found him.

“Chewin’ your lip like that. You only do it when you’re thinkin’ real hard. In the world of poker, we call that a ‘tell’.”

He saw her mouth open to retort and then close back up again when she must’ve thought better of it. She searched the apartment a second time and then finally seemed to relax a bit. She kept the lights off but threw back the curtains from the windows. A mute and yellow glow fell on the floor from lampposts stationed outside. Sombra stood against it, her shadow thrown back behind her, a dark twin watching over her. Rain pattered the glass.

McCree watched her for awhile then stood and moseyed over to stand beside her.

“How about some help with this cigar, amiga?”

She looked at him, the cigar protruding useless from his breast pocket, the tear-streaked window. She nearly chewed her lip before she caught herself. Instead, she sighed and spun him around and unlocked his restraints. He tipped his hat and tried walking off till she grabbed him and cuffed him again with his hands in front.

He found the kitchen and used a butter knife to cut the end of the cigar off after he’d unwrapped it. He used the front burners on the stovetop to light it, dipping down close to that blue icy flame till he could feel the heat kissing at his cheeks while he puffed the cigar to life.

He returned to her and sat himself in a chair beside the bed. Sombra gave him an inscrutable look in the dark and yanked the window open so his smoke funneled out into the night. With an open window came all the sounds of the city, floating up to them like lost balloons. Cars passed in the street below. A man and a woman argued a block away. The rain came harder, and a distant thunderhead clapped its gray hands together in the East. McCree drew a mouthful of smoke and sent it out to join that amalgamation of sound beyond the window.

“Who do you think done it? Sent them robots after us, I mean.”

Sombra’s fingers drummed her arms. “I don’t know. Someone who wanted either me or you or both of us dead, I suppose.”

“Or Widowmaker.”

“Si. Or her.”

“Or someone just lookin’ to do some damage to Talon.”

“Maybe.”

“Or Talon itself.”

She looked at him.

“Just a thought, darlin’.”

They both returned their attention to the rain and the night. McCree watched his cigar glow and wane as a reflection in the glass.

“Never seen you so shook up,” he said.

“I’m not ‘shook up’. I’m wary. I don’t like surprises.”

“What about birthday surprises? Cakes? Confetti?”

“Shut up, McCree.”

“Look, darlin’, I’m just tryin’ to get you to calm down. You’re still my captor. I need your head on straight if I’m makin’ it out of this thing still drawing breath. Which I intend to do.”

“You shouldn’t have shot them.”

“Who? The omnics? If I recall correctly one was trying to strangle you to death. Should I have asked him kindly not to?”

“You could’ve let the other one live, vaquero. I could’ve hacked it. Figured out who sent it.”

“Guess that’s possible.”

“It’s not ‘possible’. It’s true. Anything can be hacked.”

“And anyone?”

She looked down at him. “Si. And anyone.”

He nodded and smoked and let her answer sit in the silence between them, then he asked, “What about you?”

“What are you getting at, McCree, because I suggest you get there quick before I tire of your mouth and gag it.”

“Easy, honey. I’m just saying right now you don’t know who’s after you or what they know or who you can trust. That is except me. I’m the only dumbass who got roped into this thing without a damned clue as to what was going on. I’m the one who saved your ass back in that cabin. And, darlin’, I’m just about the only damned person in the world you can count on right now. So you need to stop thinkin’ about me as baggage to be lugged around and realize we’re on equal footing. Now, do me a favor will you and take these damn bracelets off.”

They stared at one another.

“You were about to chew that lip of yours again.”

“No I wasn’t.”

“Yes you were.” He lifted his hands and rattled the chain that lay sagging between them like a steel smile. Sombra looked everywhere else in the room except there until they were the last things left, then took a deep breath, retrieved the key, and unlocked him.

“Don’t make me regret this, McCree.”

“Muchos gracias,” he said and sat rubbing his wrists. “Now tell me, who knows about this apartment?”

“Me. And now you.”

“No one else? Not Widowmaker? Not Talon?”

“No.”

“Good. I seen a coffee pot in the kitchen. You got grounds somewhere stashed away?” She nodded. “Also good. I’m makin’ a cup. You want one?” Another nod. “How do you take it?”

“Lots of cream and even more sugar.” The smallest hint of a smile played at her lips. “I assume you take it black like a true vaquero.”

He set his cigar on the windowsill. “You assume correct, amiga.”

When he’d finished brewing a little later, he walked carefully across the room with two mugs steaming like exhaust pipes in either hand. He laid one before Sombra where she sat beside the window and sipped at his own as he leaned against the wall to look down upon the rain-slick city street. It was empty now well past midnight. Somewhere a few blocks over a dog barked ceaselessly into the black sky.

Sombra rubbed at her neck and from his vantage point McCree saw a bruise left there by the omnic who’d attacked her.

“Let me see,” he said and brushed her hand aside before she could argue. He pulled her shirt aside a bit and revealed a purplish streak just above her collarbone. He touched her skin.

“Don’t, McCree.”

“Easy now, darlin’. Drink your coffee.” He laid his hands softly on her shoulders and her posture tensed. He thought of his younger days as a farmhand in New Mexio, of the way you had to break the wild horses in, talking to them and easing their tensions before fixing them with a bridle and saddle. He approached Sombra with the same care. Her shoulders were stiff in his hands till he rubbed them a bit and felt the caution drain out of them as she gave in to him. He massaged her and she did as he instructed, sipping quietly at her coffee and watching the window.

“You got any money,” he asked.

“Dinero? Are you charging me for this shoulder rub, vaquero?”

“Ain’t like that. But if you do have money, you should put a couple bills in my hand and turn me loose for a bit. We’re in El Paso. There’s a damned gun shop every two blocks. I’d feel a whole lot better, as you should, if I had a revolver in my hand. With a decent piece? There ain’t nothin’ in this world that could get to you before my shootin’ hand dropped it dead. Count on that, darlin’.”

She was quiet a moment. He rubbed her shoulders.

“You’d run.”

“Run where? Back to my ranch? You said it yourself, whoever sent them omnics might’ve been lookin’ to kill me, not you. I’m just as invested as you are in figurin’ this mystery out. My chances are better with a partner. I wouldn’t run out on you.”

“You’re a smooth talker, McCree. Talked your way out of the handcuffs, and now talking your way out of my sight. If I didn’t know better, vaquero, I’d say you were working me over.”

“Maybe. But it don’t change the fact that everything I said has been true.”

She finished her coffee and set it on the windowsill. “I’ll give you that, McCree. You talk too much, but you don’t lie nearly as much as most people.”

“Don’t see the point in it. Lying, that is.”

“Everything is lies. They’re all around us, like gnats. They’re out in the city past this window right now. They’re following behind us. They’re waiting ahead of us. Mierda.”

Her shoulders were putty in his hands by then. He eased up on her and slowed the massage to a gentle kneading.

“Yesterday you said you were lookin’ for truth,” he said. “What does that mean?”

She was quiet a moment. “It means getting through the lies is hard work. You can spend a whole year cutting your way through a web of deceit and the only reward is the smallest nugget of truth on the other side.”

“That why you hack so many damned things? Peel off their facade? Show ‘em for what they are?”

“That’s enough talk. You’ve got skilled hands, McCree. You want to go buy yourself una pistola? Alright, vaquero. But first I’m putting you to work.”

“I’m at your service, ma’am.”

She rose smoothly in the dark like a liquid shadow and found her way to the bed. She peeled off her shirt and stepped out of her shoes and lay bare chested flat on her belly with her hands folded beneath her chin. McCree didn’t need instructions. He followed behind her and climbed up on the mattress and threw a knee over her waist to straddle her. He rubbed his hands together to warm them up and then laid his palms against all that soft brown canvas waiting for him. He worked up beneath her neck first, rubbing the tension from the top of her spine. His hands slid down to her shoulder blades and kneaded between them. When he paused to let her flesh settle, he could feel the smooth expansion and contraction of her lungs drinking in the night air. When he went back to work, the quietest of moans seeped between her lips.

He rubbed her just about every which way a woman could be rubbed then sat mounted atop her watching her breath.

“You want your feet done?”

“You’re the one who thinks they’re so pretty, aren’t you? I’m sure you’d enjoy it.”

“Well, if you don’t care then I won’t.”

“No… I want you to.”

“Then don’t beat around the bush, darlin’.”

He dismounted and swung around to the end of the bed. He bent her legs up in the air and sat himself between them. Then he took hold of one of her feet and carefully worked his fingers into her arch, using his thumbs to rub down at her heels the same time. Another quiet moan. She had completely surrendered herself to him by then. He thought briefly of escape. Of grabbing the cuffs and locking her up and leaving her hogtied there for whoever might find her. But he knew that was just a fantasy. The more time he spent with the woman, the more he grew fond of her. The old gunslinger in him wanted to keep her safe, despite the fact she was his captor and had got him caught up in this whole damned mess in the first place. That old gunslinger wasn’t always the smartest fella. He had heart though.

“If you had an egg-timer fixed to ya, it’d be goin’ off right about now, darlin’. You’re done.”

“How did you get so good at that, McCree?”

“Same way you get good at anything, I guess. Practice.”

“Oh? Is there… a girl you practice on? Some ‘southern belle’ as they say with blonde hair and blue eyes? A good and proper ninita for a vaquero like you?”

“No, ma’am. Only girl I’ve had my hands on as of late is lying right here on this bed.”

Sombra untangled her feet from his hands and turned herself over to sit up facing him. The lampposts beyond the window shaped an oblong of yellow light that fell across one of her naked breasts. The dark nipple that crowned it watched him in silence, as did its owner. A growl of thunder. The pattering of rain. Their joint breathing in the still of night.

“You’re not going to run off on me?”

“Not a chance, honey.”

“Give me your word then. That’s all you have in this world, correcto? That’s what you said. Give it to me then. I want it.”

He removed his hat and laid it over his heart. “You have my word.”

She leaned over the side of the bed and reached into her bag. She came up with a stack of bills, cut a slice off, and handed it to him. McCree rifled through it and nodded. There was enough there to actually get a decent piece.

“I’m going to scout a few blocks out, see if I can find a gun store to go to in the morning. Has to be a shitty little place so I can get them to wave registration and ammo laws. I’d like to finish that cigar up too, get some fresh air, stretch my legs.”

“If you don’t come back, I can find you, McCree. I did it once.”

“If I don’t come back, I’m sure you will, honey. But I am coming back, so all that won’t be necessary.” He went to the windowsill where his cigar lay with a long dead ash at one end and took it to the stovetop to relight. The smoke trailed behind him as he made for the door. “Should I pick up some massage oil while I’m out?”

There was that little struggle against her smirk that he liked so much, playing out on the pretty visage that was her face. “Idiota.”

“I’ll be back before you can say ‘pronto’.”

“Pronto,” she said and they shared a grin.

He took the long descent down the twists and turns of the stairwell with his cigar leaking grey smoke in his trail. He hit the ground floor and put his hand on the doorknob leading to the alley and opened it. 

A ghost from the past stood blocking his way. In the course of a single second he saw into the old days, at a younger Jesse McCree that’d been plucked out of his vagrant life with the Deadlock Gang and deposited into the waiting arms of Overwatch’s Blackwatch division by the very same dark apparition that now stood before him. His cigar slipped out of his teeth and embers and ash alike fell like snow in winter. A single word crawled up the dry canal of his throat and escaped his mouth.

“Gabriel.”

The ghost that called itself Reaper lifted its black arm and grown out of its black end like some hideous tumor was a black shotgun.

Then the stairwell filled with the deafening sound of its explosive shot.

 


	4. Chapter 4

He threw himself against the wall just as the shotgun spat a miasmic cloud of death at him. For the first time in a long time, McCree was thankful one of his arms was metal instead of flesh. Pellets skimmed across it and sparks rained where they ate away at the topmost layer. The force of the blast sent him spinning, but he didn’t feel a thing. At least not till he hit the ground and his head whacked against the wall.

When he looked up, death had entered the stairwell and stood hovering over him. From the ground, Reaper appeared ten feet tall, a roaming black mass like a storm cloud moving in. McCree looked up into that shadowed alcove beneath the thing’s hood and into the craters of its empty eyes that were set in a bone white mask. The face resembled a dead animal’s elongated skull left to rot and bleach in the sun for too long. The ghost lifted its shotgun.

McCree beat him to the punch. A gunslinger’s instinct. He pushed off the floor with the heels of his boots and drove himself into that murderous man-thing. They tangled in one another and hit the wall. Reaper’s shotgun went off like a canon in his ear and the part of the wall it hit blew away and left a cavity dug out of the concrete. McCree grabbed his assassin’s arms and they spun together in a frenzied dance. They smashed through the door and into the alley outside.

Cold night air filled McCree’s lungs like a shot of adrenaline. He threw Reaper back into the slick two-seater parked in the alley and threw his head back wide-eyed to take it all in. Reaper was reeling but fast recovering, and McCree charged him and took hold of him before he could get off another shot and drove his head against the back window of the car. The glass spiderwebbed but did not shatter until McCree roared and did it again. Then Reaper’s masked face burst through the window and his shotgun went off again down at his side. This time the pellets ate the ground and sent a spray of hot macadam fountaining up around their knees. McCree pulled the ghost out of the gaping glass maw it lay in and held him steady and hit him hard across the jaw. He used the metal fist.

Reaper fell down. Before McCree could act, though, the shotgun was up and aiming. McCree threw himself back as a blast made its way over the brim of his hat and careened off the fire escape above. The sound wrung a hollow deathly note into the black of night like a bell tolling for the deceased.

He scrambled on hands and knees to get around the back of the car as another shot ate the earth behind his heels. McCree rose and bolted for the street and behind him two more shotgun blasts growled as if the whole alley itself had come alive and grew hungry and was looking to swallow him up.

He threw himself around the building at alley’s end and stood panting against the wall. Thunder and rain played together overhead and he felt watery fingers dancing atop the brim of his hat. He dared a peak back around the corner. Reaper stood ten feet away and fired off another shot. McCree ducked back and watched as the side of the wall tore free and launched into the road in a volley of brick and rubble. He ran.

Halfway down the block another explosion trumpeted beside him and McCree looked over to see Reaper running down the empty road with both shotguns held at the ready. They pounded blasts at him with such steady rhythm they might as well’ve been war drums. Boom, the windows blew out of a car and spat broken glass at him. Boom, the tires went flat on another and sent a hiss of stale air into the night like dying snakes. Boom, a third car had its rearview mirrors torn off. McCree kept running and ducking and running some more, the creeping wind of all that attempted death breathing down his neck.

He rounded a corner and Reaper’s shotguns tore through the lamppost there. Its base was thin, and the pellets had eaten off most of the metal in a single bite. The lamppost swayed like a drunk and then the night filled with the screech of lurching metal as it fell into the street dead. It tore wires down with it and everything went off together in a firework display of bursting bulbs and cold electric explosions. The base had fell atop a car trunk and rolled off. The vehicle’s shrill alarm system triggered and wailed down the suddenly dark road. McCree kept his feet moving.

He stole a look back when the shotgun pellets stopped coming. There in the road some fifty feet behind, Reaper stood statuesque with arms and guns alike crossed over his body as if he was being set in a casket for burial. McCree knew the trick, knew it all too damned well. He snapped his head around and narrowed his eyes watching for that ghastly wisp of black smoke he knew he’d find. And he did. He changed course directly for it.

When Reaper used his little trick and materialized, McCree was right on top of him. He roared and lowered his shoulder and tackled the son of a bitch down to the earth. He was driving punches into the creature’s cloaked belly and chest even before their momentum waned off. His knuckles found ribs and felt something crunch beneath them. A hiss seeped from Reaper’s mask like a release valve and he pulled up a shotgun. McCree grabbed the barrel and wrestled the sights away.

They were still tangled when the icy splash of a car’s headlights washed down the street. They turned to watch the vehicle barrel towards them, slam the brakes, and fishtail wildly in the road leaving rubber streaks in elaborate curves behind it. The driver steered himself right into a parked car short of McCree and Reaper by less than ten feet. The crunch of metal against metal was sickening.

Reaper’s feet planted on McCree’s chest and shoved. McCree went flailing backwards, lost his balance, fell on his ass. The ghost rose and he scrambled up with it, but now they each had a shotgun of their own. McCree leveled his off at the waist and Reaper did the same. They stood twinned in the dark glass of a liquor store over the ghost’s shoulder as ethereal reflections. Behind them the car alarm wailed a long sorrowful note into the night like a lost child. Before them, the driver who’d crashed his car had opened the door and sat staring at his feet like he’d just discovered they existed.

The drizzle leaking from cloud bellies overhead had picked up to a steady cold rain. McCree watched the ghost through the steel drops that curtained him. The macadam underfoot whispered the storm’s patterings. The smell of rubber permeated all.

“God damn you, Gabriel.”

Reaper stared out of his ghoul’s mask and McCree knew right away he’d made a mistake. There was nothing of Gabriel left in that countenance of black death he peered into. The man he’d worked beside all those years ago was long gone. The reaper was all that remained.

McCree stole a sideways glance at the driver in his crashed car. He was young, probably a college kid. He sat dazed and staring numbly out at the two warriors with shotguns trained on one another in the road.

“Hey. Kid,” McCree said.

The young man looked at him and blinked.

“You hurt?”

He examined himself. “I, I don’t think so. I crashed. I wasn’t even drinking or anything.”

“Good for you. Listen, you get out of that car and turn your ass around and get running back down the road the way you came. Leave the keys in the ignition.”

“W-What?”

“You heard me. Beat feet, kid. Might get messy out here soon.”

“It’s raining.”

“Well then you’ll get wet. Now god damnit get out of here before I turn this shotgun on you and put a dozen pellets up your ass. Go!”

The kid went, staggering a bit till he got his bearings and then went sprinting off into the night and the rain, his shoes splashing in newly-formed puddles.

“Now you listen here Gabriel or whatever it is you are under that mask. I’m gonna mosey myself over to that there car and sit in it and then drive off. And you? You’re not going to do a damned thing about it or I will fill your ugly face up with lead. You got that, ghost-man?”

Reaper said nothing. Rain streaked down his mask like tears.

McCree kept the shotgun trained on him as he side-stepped through the road. He made his way to the car and sat himself inside it slowly, dipping the shotgun in and out of the driver side window and laying its barrel atop the rim to keep it fixed on the ghost as he closed the door. Then he hung one arm out the window with the shotgun and used the other to grope blindly for the ignition. He got a hold and twisted the key and turned the engine over. It purred to life on the first shot. A spot of good luck in a long stretch of bad.

As if to counter that, he took his eyes off Reaper for a single second to find the gear stick and when he looked up again the street was empty.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered and glanced back through the rear window. Black smoke tunneled up from wet earth a few yards back. 

McCree stomped the clutch and threw the car in reverse and then popped into gear and slammed it home. The tires screeched and a smoke of his own making lifted from rubber patches and then he was moving backwards, his arm thrown across the passenger’s seat headrest, his eyes narrowed beneath the brim of his hat on the ghost materializing out of the emptiness of the night.

Reaper conjured himself up in time to see the tail end of the car as McCree drove it into him. The ghost went flipping up over the trunk and rolled the rear window and woke a rumble of dented aluminum like thunder as he passed overhead. McCree watched the black figure soar out beyond the hood and go tumbling down the street in a wild roll. He hit the brakes, pumped the clutch to shift gears, stomped the gas pedal.

Reaper recovered and clambered to his feet. McCree drove straight for him, but the ghost threw himself aside and dodged at the last moment. A shotgun blast in passing blew out the front tire and shattered the passenger side window and McCree lost control as the nose of the car dipped lopsided and pulled him right back into a crash against a parked truck. All momentum died in an instant. The steering wheel plummeted into his chest. He sat back panting and coughed and tasted blood.

His fingers found the door handle and popped it. McCree hadn’t realized he was leaning against it till he spilled onto the hard concrete. The shotgun tumbled out with him and skidded across the road. He crawled for it and got a hand around the grip.

Reaper’s foot fell atop it and pinned it to the earth. McCree looked up and into the shooting end of a long black barrel.

The ghost’s voice dripped from his mask like smoked gravel. “Goodbye, Jesse.”

A cold snap. An electronic distortion. That other ghost, the one McCree found so pretty, materialized beside Reaper in her stealth suit. She held a machine pistol in her outstretched arm with its nozzle pressed to Reaper’s temple.

“Drop it, Reyes,” Sombra said.

Silence cloaked the world. Every second passed like a labored heart beat. No one moved and the rain fell around them indifferent to the severity of the moment.

Reaper spoke. “What are you doing?”

“What am _I_ doing? What the hell are _you_ doing, Reyes!? How did you find me? Where’s Widow? And why are you trying to kill McCree? That was never part of the plan.”

“He was free when I came to the building you were in. I didn’t see you. I thought he might’ve killed you and was fleeing. Put the gun down, Sombra.”

“Andante a la cresta.”

McCree spat blood. “Howdy, darlin’. Long time no see. Now I don’t know what you just said, but I’m hopin’ its somethin’ mean. Don’t take the gun off this psycho.” He reached up and ripped the shotgun out of Reaper’s hand. “There you go, Gabriel. Not so scary unarmed, are ya?”

“Where’s Widow?” Sombra asked.

“The spider is busy.”

“How did you find me, Reyes? Answer me.”

He was quiet a moment, then said, “You’re tracked. It’s not personal. Talon tracks everyone. I’m tracked. Widow is tracked. You’re tracked. Put the gun down, Sombra.”

“Don’t, honey,” McCree said.

“Get up, vaquero.”

“Workin’ on it.” He pushed off the ground and felt his whole chest hate him for doing so. He spat blood again and used the car door for leverage to crawl to a stand. He stood swaying a moment, collecting himself. The damned car alarm was still howling down the road.

“Come here, McCree. Lean on me.” McCree was in no shape to argue with a woman’s orders. He stumbled to her and draped his arm over her shoulder. She took his weight against her with stride and backed up a step. “As for you, Reyes, you just stand right there. I’ve been dealing with Widow this whole time and that’s the only person I intend to _keep_ dealing with. You tell her that. Or Talon. Or whoever the hell you want. But do not follow me. If you do… seras un fantasma muerto.”

Caverns watched out of Reaper’s skulled face. He was silent as they fell back.

They were almost to the end of the block before McCree heard the ghost’s voice call to him. “Jesse…” And when he looked, Reaper looked like death itself standing amidst all that dark and carnage and rain as he said, “I’ll see you again.”

McCree tipped his hat.

When they’d put four blocks of distance between them and the wreckage, Sombra turned those lovely blue eyes of her’s up at McCree and watched him carefully while they walked.

“Are you hurt?”

“Don’t think so. Car crash shook me a bit is all. I’ll be fine. Just gotta walk it off.”

“I heard the gunshots and dressed as fast as I could.”

“You ain’t gotta explain yourself to me, darlin’. You saved my ass back there. Guess that puts us at about even, don’t it?”

That smile. It would be the death of him yet. “Guess so, vaquero.”

They walked three more blocks before McCree’s gait straightened out and he could move on his own. They huddled together against the rain and when they came upon a big glowing marquee wrapped around a street corner with the words ‘Diner’ aglow in blue stylized font, McCree talked her into stopping in.

They shouldered through the door and sat in the first booth they came across. The place was empty save for a waitress, a fat man behind the counter with a chef’s hat on, and some young couple giggling and flirting down at the diner’s other end.

The waitress came to them right away.

“Howdy, y’all. Getchya anything to start? Or are y’all ready to order?”

“Just coffee for me,” Sombra said, keeping her face down and hidden from the stranger.

“Coffee. We can do that. How ‘bout you, cowboy?”

“Coffee. Eggs. Bacon.”

“Sure thing. I’ll be right back.”

“Appreciate it.”

When they were alone again, Sombra spoke in a hushed voice. “You think he’s coming?”

“Gabriel? Nah. He took a whoopin’ for the most part of that fight. Imagine he’ll slink back to Talon with his tail between his legs for now.”

“Si. ‘For now’.” She sighed and drummed her fingers against the tabletop. She glanced over either shoulder and huddled deeper between them.

“You don’t go out much, huh?”

“Out? No. Too many people watching. Too many eyes. I prefer the shadows.”

McCree considered it and laughed. “Shadows. Hell, I just put that together. My Spanish ain’t nothin’ to brag about, but I remember the words for ‘the shadow’ well enough. The shadow… ‘la sombra’.”

“Bravo, vaquero. Muy bien.”

“Gracias.”

The waitress returned and set their coffees before them. “Food’ll be out in a minute, hun,” she said and vanished.

Sombra tensed and McCree heard the reason why. Sirens blaring in the city. Cop cars rushing down streets. Lots of them. She nearly stood up till McCree reached across the table and grabbed her hand in his.

“It’s alright, darlin’. Calm down.”

“Don’t, McCree! Don’t you heat that!?”

“I hear it. But listen. They ain’t comin’ this way. They’re movin’ away from us. Other direction. Listen.”

They both did and he was right. Faintly, the noise receded.

Sombra sat back down and breathed easier. “Let go of my hand.”

“You ain’t gotta be so damn tough all the time, you know.”

“Let go of my hand, McCree.”

He squeezed it just a bit tighter.

“Darlin’, you gotta let me in a little, alright? I almost lost a head back there to your Talon buddy. If we’re in this together, keepin’ each other alive like we been and what have you, then you gotta stop runnin’ from me every time I ask you somethin’ you don’t wanna answer or touch you in a way you ain’t want to be touched. I’m just holdin’ your hand to comfort you. Is that so wrong?”

She held his eyes. Her nostrils flared in and out as she drew breath. Slowly, her tension deflated.

“Alright, McCree. Acuerdo. Deal.” She looked at his hand covering hers and nodded. “Gracias.”

“De nada,” he said and let her go.

Outside the diner, the whirring blades of a passing chopper cut the sky. Less than twenty seconds later and a second trailed behind it. They sounded like they were heading in the same direction as the sirens.

McCree eyed the darkness beyond the glass. “Whole lot of commotion out there tonight.”

“Si. Too much. It’s like something exploded. Or a building fell down. Or someone important died.”

They looked at each other. Another chopper blared past overhead.

“Someone important,” McCree said and rubbed his bearded chin. “You don’t think…”

“Reyes said the spider was busy.”

“Well, shit.” McCree flagged the man in the chef’s hat’s attention. “Hey, bud. You mind throwin’ the local news on that TV of yours?”

“Yeah, alright.”

A big flat screen lay black and mute above the diner counter. The man fished a remote from his pocket and turned it on and switched to a specific channel. A blond reporter appeared in front of El Paso’s city hall, where the long ascent of the stairs were sectioned off behind yellow police tape. The volume was all the way down, but the banner trimming the lower third of the screen made the news plain enough: ‘El Paso Mayor Assassinated’. The three of them watched for a bit. Then the shot cut away to something else, this bannered with the words: ‘Photo Of Suspects Delivered Thru Anonymous Tip’. And on this new screen was a highly detailed photo of McCree and Sombra sitting on his back porch together two days earlier. Their names stenciled to the screen, followed by a single word: ‘WANTED’.

“Huh,” McCree said.

The man in the chef’s hat looked from the TV to the two of them in their booth. He looked back at the TV. He looked at them again. His mouth slowly gaped.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, ducked under the counter, and came up cocking a shell into a shotgun.

“Everyone’s armed in Texas,” McCree muttered and sighed. “Now, listen bud, you ain’t got to-”

“Hey! Where’s your friend!?”

McCree looked across the table and found no one. He shook his head and tipped his hat to the man with the shotgun. “Sorry, bud. But I imagine this is gonna hurt.”

The man frowned. “What’s going to hurt?”

Sombra shed her stealth camouflage right beside him, grabbed the shotgun out of his hands, and drove the barrel against the man’s forehead. He had just enough time to look stupefied before he slumped back against the counter and fell to the floor unconscious with a crash of plates. The waitress screamed and fled for the kitchen. The young couple mimicked her and ran outside.

“Time to go,” Sombra said.

“Yeah, I was just thinkin’ that.”

They left. That night world beyond the diner was still buzzing with the sound of a few dozen cop cars’ shrill cries and helicopters swarming overhead like hornets. Somewhere out there in all that darkness, a mayor lay dead and a spider nested with her belly full. And now two fugitives moved shoulder to shoulder through the shadows of the city, blurred figures in the rain, whispers in the wind, hunted and alone.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

He sat up in bed sucking air down his lungs and staring at nothing. Cold sweat beaded down his bare chest. He tossed the sheet covering him aside and looked himself over. He was naked, save for a cluster of bandages and medical tape layered over his ribs. He put his hand on his heart and felt it pumping life. He stayed like that awhile.

“Bad dream, vaquero?”

Sombra sat in the corner of the motel room, half awash in shadow. The curtains hiding them from the morning beyond the windows were split in the center like an open wound, bleeding light in a thin pale strip across the carpet. Sombra squinted through that seam, a dark and silent vigil over the world’s ceaseless turning.

McCree ran his hands through his hair and breathed deep. The adrenaline of the previous night’s battle gone, a line of needles pricked across his chest. He winced and draped his arm over his bandages.

“Darlin’?”

“Si?”

“Why am I naked?”

Even across the room, he could see the upward curve of her lips.

“Does that excite you, McCree?”

“About as much as it confuses me.”

“Relax. We walked all night through the rain in case you forgot. As soon as we checked in this place you were face down snoring. Must’ve been a tougher fight with Reyes than you let on. You’re clothes were soaked. So I took them off. No es gran cosa.”

“You bandaged me up?”

“You were black and blue under your shirt. I did what I could. Are your ribs broken?”

He poked around. “Probably just bruised. I’ll live. You have my thanks.”

“I didn’t ask for it.”

“Well, you got it all the same.”

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood. He planted a hand on his hip and leaned into it to stretch his back. He saw Sombra watching his nakedness from her corner, his manhood swinging free below his waist. Her grin had yet to subside.

“Enjoying the show, honey?”

“Just making us even, _darling_. You saw so much of me the other day. Only fair I get to drink you in a little, isn’t it?”

“Fair enough. Drink up.”

He stretched his other side, holding a hand carefully against his bruised ribs and then went into the bathroom and ran the faucet and splashed palmfuls of cold water against his face. He toweled himself dry and returned to the bedroom. He sauntered nude to the window and peaked out as Sombra did, narrowing his eyes against all that bright morning sun beating against them. The motel lot was empty. On the sidewalk, an old lady walked her dog and beyond her cars passed indifferently down the road, engines waxing and waning like tidal waves.

“No one on our heels?”

“Not that I saw. I watched all night.”

He looked down at her. “All night? Darlin’, you ain’t slept yet?”

“How could I sleep? _You_ slept. One of us has to keep watch now, McCree. We’re fugitives. And I’ve decided Talon is likely trying to kill me. Or capture me. Or maybe they don’t care which one, but they’re most certainly after me.”

He sat on the counter and crossed his arms. “And how did you decide that?”

She shifted her weight restlessly in the chair as if it had shrunk in around her. “That picture last night on the news? Of you and I on your porch? No one could’ve taken that except Widowmaker. The road North that day was a mile long stretch of nothing. Only the hills stood at that angle the picture was taken. The hills and the spider.”

“Adds up, I guess. Question is, why?”

She shifted again. “Still piecing that one together. But if I had to guess? I’d say Talon was always planning on framing you and I for the assassination last night. It would explain why those omnics showed up at the cabin. Only Talon knew we were there.”

“Right,” McCree said. “So they sent them things in to kill or capture us and then Widowmaker assassinates the mayor and, presto, there we are lookin’ awful guilty suddenly right outside El Paso.”

“Exactamente.”

He considered it. “I get why they’d throw me under the bus. I ain’t nothin’ to them, after all. But why you?”

She started to shift in the chair again and McCree stopped her by reaching down and grabbing her knee.

“Easy, honey. We’re just talkin’ here.”

Sombra looked at his hand on her leg and nodded and sat still.

“They might know I was… looking around in their system.”

“Looking around? That a fancy way to say ‘spying on ‘em’?”

She pressed her lips tightly together and seemed to nod only on sheer force of will. “Si. I spied on them.”

“Find anything good?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I thought we were bein’ honest with each other here.”

She looked at him and held his eyes in her own and in that pure lapis reflection he could see his own sleek nakedness stretched before her.

“You want to be honest? Then you start, McCree. Tell me the truth. What did you dream of last night?”

“How do you know I dreamed anything?”

“I know. You were muttering in your sleep, and when I looked over your hand, the one that isn’t mechanical, it was groping about and closing around some imaginary pistola.” She shrugged. “At least, that’s what I pictured.”

He leaned back and took a long breath, eyeing the shadowed lines in the ceiling that ran overhead like some intricate web.

“Well, I guess I was dreamin’ of the old days. Back when I was just a young buck runnin’ with the Deadlock Gang. Buncha kids who thought they’d live forever, makin’ trouble or findin’ trouble or, more likely than not, havin’ trouble find us. I dream a lot about those days anymore. They seem purer in my mind than everything that came after, but… heck, that could just be my head wishin’ it that way, I suppose.”

She smiled. “So it was a good dream?”

“Good enough. Till Death showed up in his black cloak and skull mask. Tanglin’ with Gabriel last night must’ve conjured him up. A dark blur, chasin’ us kids across a valley. The lot of us on horseback, spurrin’ those beasts as hard as they could be spurred. We were breakin’ for the river to get away. Got real close. Then Death snatched me right off my saddle with a giant’s hand and took me away from all that.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then I woke up.” He looked down at her and matched her smile. “And, lo and behold, I was naked in a dark room with a beautiful woman.”

“Beautiful, huh? Eres encantador, vaquero.”

“Just tellin’ it like it is. Truth, right. That’s what you’re after, so there’s a little for ya. My gift to you.” He fetched his hat from the counter where it lay with his drying clothes in a strip of sunlight and tucked it on his head and tipped the brim. 

“Muchas gracias,” Sombra said and tipped an invisible brim of her own. “Now before you charm me any further, I want to sleep and I want to shower.”

“In that order? ‘Cause you know, I hear people drown that way.”

“Muy divertido.” She rose cat-like from the chair and stretched herself and McCree watched curves form against her stealth suit.

“Ya know, I could use a shower myself.”

She eyed him with smiling suspicion. “Si?”

“It’s a nice motel. Least we could do for ‘em since they put us up is to save on their water bill.”

To that she said nothing. She went into the bathroom and McCree stood there rocking on his heels watching after her and then followed behind. He leaned against the door jamb and Sombra looked up at him as she sat the toilet seat peeling off her suit. She shook her head but did not send him away. She unzipped herself and stepped slowly from her clothing till it was just a discarded heap on the floor. Then she drew herself up and all the wonder of her naked beauty stretched before him and set his heart hammering against his chest. Sombra stayed like that awhile, letting him gawk and grinning like she knew the world’s greatest secret. She laughed and shook her head and slid back the glass door of the shower to step daintily inside.

“Coming, vaquero?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He took off his hat and laid it on the sink and followed in behind her. Sombra slid the door shut, encasing them in glass. She turned the hot water on and stood beneath the shower head letting it wash through her dark hair and down her copper skin and pool around her bare feet. She tilted her head back and the rain kissed her cheeks, misting a half inch above her flesh like an aura. She peaked with one eye at McCree and laughed and took hold of his arm and pulled him under the water. It raked down his neck and back with hot liquid fingers and he winced only till he grew accustomed. Sombra’s hands lifted into his hair and flattened it back as the water coursed through. She took a palmful of shampoo from a sampler bottle set in an indentation against the wall and rubbed it into his hair, massaging his scalp and working it to suds before turning those delicate fingers on herself. When her arms lifted, McCree’s eyes were drawn to her breasts like magnets. Soapy foam had found its way to the tip of her nipple where it dripped and fell to the smooth lines of her naked belly and then was lost further downwards in a thin strip of dark pubic hair.

She took him close to her to stand beneath the water together and rinse the shampoo from their hair. He could feel the warmth of her body as she pressed near. Her toes stood atop his. Her breasts found his ribs, nipples prodding him. Then she took a bar of soap and lathered her hands and started working them into her flesh, her arms, her chest, her thighs. Her fingers left little streaks of soap and shimmering skin wherever they roamed. McCree pulled a deep breath and looked away but by then it was too late. He stepped back.

“Darlin’, I’ve got a bit of a situation here.”

Sombra looked below his waist. “Dios mio, vaquero.”

“Well, I’m only a man after all.”

She put her hands on her hips and looked him up and down and back again. With a roll of her eyes she said, “Come here, then,” and McCree did. She stepped into him and looked up into his eyes and her hand fell casually to her side so that her fingers could wrap around his stiffness. McCree’s mouth gaped and she shushed him and then pumped him. It took less than thirty seconds all hot and bothered as he was and then McCree was left leaning against the wall panting.

“Feel better?”

“Yes, ma’am, I believe I do.”

“Bueno. Now finish up.”

They washed themselves the rest of the way in silence. McCree did his best to not look at her nakedness anymore. When they finished, they toweled dry and returned to the bedroom. Sombra pulled on panties and a T-shirt and McCree stepped into his underwear and jeans.

“Did you wash my jeans?” He asked as he fastened his belt.

“Of course. They were filthy and wet. I did them in the sink.”

“Gracias, amiga. I don’t think I’ve seen these old jeans this clean in about a decade.”

She grimaced. “You have jeans a decade old? More importantly, McCree, you still _wear_ jeans a decade old?”

“Well they ain’t got no expiration date, do they?”

Sombra fetched a plastic bag from beside the bed and removed two bottles of water and a pair of saran-wrapped subs. She set everything out on a table and gestured and McCree joined her. They ate like they’d never ate before, woofing down the sandwiches and leaving no crumb behind. Then they sat drinking water without speaking as the passing cars outside came and went and came and went. 

“What now?”

“Now I sleep,” said Sombra. “And you protect me. Can you handle that, vaquero?”

“I can handle that.”

“Bueno.”

She went to the bed and threw herself down. She lay spread out first, taking deep breaths and letting the mattress cradle her in its depths. Then she rolled to her side and patted the emptiness she’d created there.

“Come. Lay down.”

He went. He laid down.

They faced each other, Sombra showing off her secretive smile, McCree watching carefully into the pretty wells of her eyes. She turned herself around and nestled against him.

“Put your arm over me,” she said and he did. She worked herself tightly against him and clutched his arm under hers like a pillow. Her fingers played with his. “This is nice. It’s been a long time since I’ve trusted someone enough to hold me, vaquero. You should be honored.”

“You trust me then?”

“Si.”

“Completely?”

She was quiet in her consideration. “Well… no, but I don’t trust anyone like that.”

“Not one person? Not a single damned person in this whole world? Darlin’, what kind of life is that to live?”

“A safe one. An honest one.”

When she inhaled the expansion of her lungs pressed her body just slightly deeper into his. She was warmer and softer against him with every breath drawn.

“What’s your name,” he asked.

“You’re a stubborn one. Just make it up in your head, McCree. It doesn’t matter.”

“Careful, honey. If you leave it to me, I’m gonna have to name you… Gertrude.”

“Gertrude?”

“Yep.”

“…I like it. It’s cute.”

“You like Gertrude?”

“Si. I like Gertrude, and you have ten year old jeans.”

He laughed. “That make us even or somethin’?”

“I don’t know what that makes us, McCree.”

He propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at her spooned against him. Her eyes were closed, her breathing slowed, her lips just slightly parted. He watched her and wondered if he’d ever seen a person look so beautiful just lying there trying to sleep.

“I’d like to kiss you,” he confessed.

“You can. Cheek only, pervertido.”

He leaned down and kissed her cheek. Her skin was soft and had a sweet taste.

“Just don’t go and fall in love with me, vaquero.”

“What if that’s too late?”

“Then you’re in trouble. You know how this ends, McCree.”

“How does it end, darlin’?”

“Let’s not spoil things. It’s nice just lying here.”

He used his free hand to stroke fingers through her hair. Her slow steady breaths and those tidal wave engines outside were the only sounds left in the whole world alongside his heart, which seemed to play slow and somber in his chest like an old forlorn toy winding down. He stared at the strip of light that lay cutting the room in halves. It looked awfully lonesome with those two dark worlds twinning up on either side, smothering in around it.

“Are you okay, McCree.”

“Doing fine.”

She turned herself around so that they faced each other. Her smaller frame eclipsed in his, her dark eyes forced upwards to look at him, her hands clasped as if in prayer. He draped his arm over her shoulder and she smiled appreciatively.

“Do you want to know why I keep running?”

“Honey, I’d like to hear nothing more.”

“I’ve been running since I was a little girl, McCree. Since la Medianoche. The Midnight. The war.”

“The Omnic Crisis.”

“Si. Mexico was ravaged in that war. Lots of places were, but Mexico was among the worst. When it came it devoured all. I watched buildings collapse and fires consume streets and houses and people alike. I watched a hospital explode. I listened to children my age or younger wailing and screaming in the night. I smelled what flesh becomes when its been left to rot because the relief efforts can’t fight their way through the rubble of a city turned into a battlefield. I held mi padre’s hand as he drew his last breath.”

“Darlin’, I’m so sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about now. War is war. Be sorry for the little girl holding her father’s cold hand in the ashes of her home, but don’t be sorry for the woman who replaced her. The girl was weak and naive. A victim. The woman is una sombra, a shadow, and a shadow can never be hurt. It goes where it pleases. It lives in the dark truths the world would see thrown away or buried. It stands behind every man and every woman who walks in the light, watching. La sombra es imperecedero.”

He lay stroking her cheek with his thumb and watching her eyes drawn far away into some distant past where dark things roamed.

“That war happened for more complicated reasons than you know, McCree. All wars are like that. There are big gears that turn and catch the eye, but how many little gears run circles beneath them giving them power? How many corporations and politicians and war generals collude in secrecy to make the world turn just as they see fit? There are truths hidden in every death, answers behind every spilled tear, clarity fired from the chamber of every gun. The world is a fog of lies, and that fog would’ve seen me blind after it took everything from me. But I didn’t lay down blind. I got up and ran, ran with the shadows, in them, of them, and I’ve been running ever since till I _became_ one. Till I became Sombra.”

“And what does Sombra want, honey? To expose the truth?”

“To expose everything, vaquero. Everything.”

They went quiet. McCree hugged the woman a little closer to him and she allowed herself to be pulled in. Their breaths fell in rhythm with each other. Their legs tangled and became one.

“Just tell me you’ll protect me while I sleep, McCree. I haven’t felt safe sleeping in… a long time. Just say it and mean it.”

“I’ll protect you. You have my word.”

“Bueno.” She smiled. “I like having your word.”

“And I like giving it to you, darlin’. I truly do.”

She closed her eyes and pressed her face to his chest. He held her and watched her body rise and fall beneath him.

“…darlin’?”

“Mmm?”

“What’s your name?”

But by then she was already asleep.

 


	6. Chapter 6

There was a commercial district not far from the motel, a strip of shops and restaurants rolling between El Paso’s inner city and its outskirts, and it was there McCree walked with his shoulders high and his hands deep in his pockets. He passed his reflection in every storefront and found a stranger walking beside him in the recesses of that dark and liquid glass. A man in a baseball cap with big aviator sunglasses the color of blood that hid him away from wandering eyes. A bearded nomad. A gunslinger turned tourist.

He went into the first store he came across that sold jeans and rifled through the racks till he found his size. He went into the changing room and put them on and tested the feel of his gait as he paced. He came out wearing them and threw his old jeans on the checkout counter. The salesman rung him up and he paid with Sombra’s money. A leather jacket hung from a discount rack caught his eye and he asked for a moment to try it on. He stepped in front of a mirror and fidgeted with the collar and cuffs till it sat just right over his frame.

“It looks great on you, sir,” the salesman said, his smile large and plastic.

“I’m sure it does.” McCree looked around. “Give me a second.”

“Sir?”

He went to the front door of the shop with the salesman yapping behind him about paying and stood there till a woman passed by on the sidewalk.

“Ma’am.”

She looked at him and frowned.

“How do you think this jacket looks on me?”

“Are you serious?”

“‘Bout as serious as a man can be.”

She examined him. “It looks nice. Fits you well.”

“Thank you much,” he said and tipped his baseball cap. He returned to the counter and laid another bill down. “I’ll take the jacket too.”

The salesman rang him again, his hands shuffling through the money impatiently. “I told you how it looked.”

“Yeah, but she had no stake in the outcome. Plus, I’m lookin’ for a more… feminine opinion. Nothing personal, bud.”

He paid and wore his new jacket and jeans out. At the door, the salesman called him back to retrieve his old pants.

“Just throw ‘em out.”

The man walking beside him in the glass still looked a stranger, but he was a well-dressed stranger now and that went a long way. McCree followed the sidewalk, bleach white beneath the afternoon sun, for three blocks till he found himself standing outside a little corner gun shop. ‘Jones and McCallister’s Guns ’N Ammo’ read the sign. Beneath, a picture of two crossed shotguns. 

He went inside and got a ‘Howdy’ from the man stooled up behind the counter. McCree tipped his hat and moseyed up to stand basking in rows and racks of every sort of gun imaginable. The clerk started in on a sale’s pitch but McCree held up a hand to stop him. He hooked his thumbs under his waistband and sauntered down the row of weaponry till he found what he was looking for.

“Fan of six-shooters, huh? Figured as much when you walked in. Got that cowboy look about ya.”

“That one,” McCree pointed out a steel-grey revolver with a long barrel and carved ivory stocks on the grips, trimmed with silver inlays. The clerk put it in his hand and McCree flipped the cylinder open and snapped it closed and leveled it off with his shoulder and eyed down the sight. You never really knew the weight of an instrument till it was loaded up, but empty as it was, he still thought it felt pretty damned good.

“It’s a throwback,” the clerk said. “Single action. Gotta work the hammer on every shot. More of a collector’s piece than anything.”

“How much?”

The clerk sucked his lip. “Do ‘er for a grand.”

McCree whistled. “Only way I’m payin’ that is if it comes loaded with a couple of hundred dollar bills in the barrel. How ‘bout six hundred.”

“Nine.”

“Six fifty.”

“God damn, fella. I’ll do eight and I ain’t doin’ no lower.”

“Eight it is.” He stuck his hand out and the man shook it. “And I’m gonna give you the full grand anyway and we’re gonna forget about registration.”

The clerk stopped shaking. His eyes narrowed into McCree’s aviators.

“You ain’t a cop, is you fella?”

McCree smiled. “You said it yourself, partner. I’m a cowboy.”

He walked out with the revolver stashed beneath his waistband and shirt and his pocket bulging with a box of 45s. He crossed the street and got himself turned around to head back the way he came. A few blocks down the road he passed a restaurant with a nice outdoor dining area that lay boxed in behind a railing. A couple sat beneath an umbrella-shaded table eating lunch, and between them stood a vase of white roses. McCree leaned over the railing and plucked a trio of them out.

“Hey!”

McCree tipped his hat. “Appreciate it.”

He got back to the motel just as the sun was starting in on its slow creep for the western horizon and the day was red and shadows long. He stopped before the windows of their apartment and fixed the collar of his jacket and folded down fresh crinkles in his new jeans. Then he held the flowers to his chest and opened the door.

“Darlin’, I’m gonna owe you some money after today, but I’m good for it. Wait till you see the piece I picked up.”

His eyes adjusted to the dimness of the room and slowly Sombra came into focus. She was sat in a chair with her arms pulled back behind her. A dark cloth cleaved between her lips and teeth, gagging her. Her expression was grave. McCree stared at her numbly, listening to the heavy drum of his heart. The door shut behind him.

He turned expecting Widowmaker or Reaper or maybe an omnic. What he found instead was another revenant from his past, another apparition conjured up in this uncanny adventure he’d found himself helplessly tumbling through. The man stood at height with him, statuesque in his black/blue pants and blazer. Above his mask and the red strip of his visor, unkempt wisps of greying hair were the only evidence to mark his place in the passing of time.

“Jack,” McCree said.

“Jesse,” said the old soldier. There was an assault rifle in his hands.

“You plannin’ on shooting that thing?”

“That depends.”

“On?”

Jack Morrison leaned to his side and nodded towards Sombra. “Is it true? Because I know you weren’t expecting company, Jesse, so I don’t think those flowers in your hand are for me. Are you working with that woman? The two of you are all over the news in case you didn’t know.”

McCree looked back and held Sombra’s eyes. “You alright, honey?”

She nodded.

“Picked you up some flowers.” He held them high then tossed them on the bed. Sombra watched them in her forced silence. Around her gag, a hint of a smile. That eased McCree up some.

“Jesse…”

“What do you want me to say Jack? Hell, how’d you even find me?”

“Anonymous call-in.”

“Call-in to where? What even are you these days? Military? Government? Or just some asshole with a fancy visor?”

“Watch your mouth, kid.”

“Ain’t a kid no more, Jack.” 

“I’m Overwatch.”

McCree stared deeply into the crimson horizon of his old friend’s eyes and saw the past projected there like a stage play, saw the rubble and ash of a dead organization and the disbanding of its motley crew of warriors and misfits. “Overwatch? Jack, you gone senile already? Overwatch is dead.”

“It’s been brought back to life. I know the news moves slow down here in Texas where you’re busy drinking and wasting away on your ranch, but the team is back together. Some of us, anyway. And some decent citizen called you two in and gave you up. And now I’m standing here trying to figure out if I’m taking in two prisoners or one, so watch your damn mouth, Jesse.”

McCree tensed and instinctively wanted to go for the revolver tucked in his waistband. Only he hadn't loaded it up with anything, and even in his skilled hand, an empty revolver was about as useful as a three-legged horse. He resolved to gritting his teeth.

“You ain’t takin’ her, Jack. I can tell you that for damn sure right now.”

“Then you are working with her.”

“We ain’t ‘working’. We… fell in with one another. Call it a mutually beneficial partnership. Talon is after her, Jack. You remember Talon, right? They’re the bad guys in case you forgot. I’m trying to protect her.”

Jack shook his head. “You’re a real dumbass, Jesse. Still thinking with your heart instead of your head, just like that teenaged vagabond with the smart mouth I first met some twenty years ago. She’s _with_ Talon. We have surveillance footage of that woman all across the globe with them.”

“She ain’t no more.”

“Whether she is or she isn’t, she’s still one of the most elusive criminals this world’s ever known. She’s a thief and a hacker and now she’s under arrest whether you like that or not, kid.”

McCree took a step closer and raised a finger. “I warned you about callin’ me ‘kid’, Jack. And the only way you’re takin’ her is over my dead body.”

“Grow up, Jesse.”

A trio of stiff pounds at the door.

“All fine in here,” Jack shouted to carry his voice outside. “We’ll be out in a minute.” He must’ve seen something bleak on McCree’s face. “What? You thought I was alone? I had a whole truck full of troops staked out around the corner. I was just waiting for you, Jesse. See what the quiet ranch life did to you.” He sized him up. “I have to say, I expected more.”

“You ain’t takin’ her.”

“I am. She’ll be brought to the new Overwatch headquarters and placed in confinement. Then she’ll be interrogated. When we’re done with her and turn her over to the feds, she might get a nice twenty or thirty year sentence if she cooperates. You can still play ‘cowboy’ with her in your sixties, can’t you, kid?”

McCree hit him. It was a good shot, clean, straight across the jaw. Mercifully, he used the hand of flesh and not the hand of metal. Jack stumbled back gripping his face and growling under his mask like an old grizzled pit bull. McCree drew his arms up ready for a fight.

Jack recovered and stared at him through the cold fire of his visor. “I’m going to give you that one, Jesse. And only because Angela asked me to not hurt you before I left. A mayor was assassinated. I’m pulling a lot of strings right now not to have you locked up too. We’re giving you the benefit of the doubt that you aren’t in collusion with that criminal. We won’t be so kind twice.” His gloved fingers played beneath the barrel of his assault rifle. “Now am I going to walk out of here with her, or is there going to be a problem?”

McCree stood his ground. Jack stood his. If he’d had the brains to load his revolver, they would’ve been in a good and proper Mexican standoff. Sombra rose and walked between them, facing McCree with a slow shake of her head. He looked down and got lost in her eyes and the fight went out of him.

“Let me at least take that gag off her so I can talk to her.”

“She ran her mouth enough before you got here,” Jack said and went to the door. He opened it and leaned against the jamb. “Whatever you have to say, say it quick, Jesse. Age has made me an inpatient man.”

McCree laid his hands on her shoulders. “You sure you’re okay?”

Sombra nodded.

“He didn’t hurt you or nothin’, did he?”

She shook ‘no’.

“Look, I got friends in Overwatch still. Least I think I do. I’ll make a call, see that you’re treated right. If you help them take down Talon, tell ‘em what you know and everything, I think they’ll let you go. Hell, I’ll make ‘em. Alright?”

She nodded.

He forced a grin. “Ain’t so funny when the gag’s in the other mouth is it?”

A grin of her own, fighting against the cloth silencing her. She shook her head.

“Alright.” He rubbed her shoulders. His hands felt pinned there, drawn in and stuck by some magnetic force pounding from his chest cavity and seizing control of his every muscle. He tensed when Jack told him it was time and found himself looking into her eyes again, those irises the color of unsullied sky, of clear creek water, of fresh bellflowers. He glanced to the roses he’d brought, retrieved one, and tucked it behind her ear. It was a better way to look upon her as Jack came and took her arm under his and dragged her away. McCree’s feet followed, moving of their own accord.

Outside, an armored truck had backed to the curb and lay in wait with its rear doors open. Jack walked her up its ramp and sat her in a seat and locked her in by her ankles and waist. He sat across from her and looked out as his men, faceless troops in matching garb, took her belongings up front and stationed themselves on either side of her.

“What am I supposed to do, Jack?” McCree asked.

“Do what you do best, Jesse. Go back to your ranch and drink and pass the time until someone comes along with a big bag of money and puts it in front of you to buy your shooting hand. You’re not to leave the state. Consider yourself grounded until my investigation is complete.”

A troop closed one door and hid Sombra behind it. He went to the other door and waited while McCree and his former friend stared one another down.

“I saw Gabriel, Jack.”

The old soldier looked away. “Gabriel’s dead.”

“Then I saw his ghost.”

“Terrible thing,” Jack said with a shake of his head, “for a man like that to become a ghost.”

“Better than to become a coward.”

He faced McCree and before he could reply was entombed in the truck when the troop slammed shut the door. The sound of metal against metal, the crisp snapping of locks, the hum of the engine coming alive, it all played into that empty motel lot like an old sorrowful song.

When it drove off, McCree stood in the dust and the silence watching after it. He didn’t move for a long time.

As dusk fell he went back inside the motel room and threw down his baseball cap and tossed the aviator’s across the room where one lens burst like a firework against the wall. He sat on the edge of the bed and ran fingers through his hair till it hurt. He stood and paced and sat again. Then he went to the counter and picked up his cowboy hat and tucked it over his head. Beneath where it had laid, a lonely white island amidst the wooden sea of the countertop, a folded piece of paper waited.

McCree took it and unfolded it. The words inside: ‘ _Vaquero, I’m watching out the window. I think I saw a truck with a man I recognized from Overwatch inside. I don’t know how much time I have. If something does happen and I’m gone when you return, remember you promised to protect me. You gave me your word. -The Woman with No Name._ ’

He read the words and stared out the window and read them again. He folded the note up and tucked it in his pocket. Then he picked up the motel phone and let it go to the office where he asked a man to call him a taxi.

He was dropped off in front of his ranch an hour later and the world around him was dark and bleak and the stars hung lofty in their burning vigil against that black canvas, casting lonesome eyes down upon the earth where his feet carried him forth in pools of silver moonlight to an empty house. He went in his kitchen and got a beer from the fridge. It was cold funneling down his throat, but no taste found his tongue and he dumped the rest in the sink. He looked at the walls, the windows, the sparse littering of furniture. They seemed to stand miles apart and he felt very small in their company. He went on his back porch and stood looking out at the endless horizon.

He pulled his new revolver out and polished the barrel against his shirt. He took out the box of ammo and scooped a handful of 45s into his palm before fingering them into the hollowed curves of the gun’s empty chambers. He spun the cylinder and snapped it in place with a well practiced flick of his wrist and took aim at nothing in particular. He shot the sky and listened to the flat pop that roared through that stretch of Texas nothing like a cannon. In the hills north it reverberated and echoed and sent a colony of bats beating ebon wings as they scattered into the distance. He watched them go and admired their freedom and then fired another shot just to kill the silence before heading back inside.

His cell phone was stashed in the drawer of his bedside table. He took it and fingered it to life. No one ever told him how to store numbers in the damn thing and he never bothered to learn so he fetched up his little notebook of contacts and flipped through the pages till he found the name he needed. He dialed and sat in the dark quiet of his bedroom. A single strip of moonlight cut through the half-shut curtains and put a shine on his metal forearm. He flexed it as he listened to the phone ring on the other end.

Her voice, soft and mellifluous.

“Hello?”

“…Angela.”

“Jesse?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“I thought you’d be calling sooner or later. How are you?”

“Still alive. Guess that counts for somethin’.”

A hesitation. “Did you see Jack today?”

“I saw him.”

“How did it go?”

“‘Bout how you’d expect.”

“Jesse…”

“Look, you know I wouldn’t call you up botherin’ ya if I didn’t need a favor. That woman Jack took in today, she ain’t the bad guy, Angela. I need you to watch out for her. Take care of her. Make sure no one hurts her. Can you do all that for me?”

“Yes. I can do that.”

“Thanks, Angela. You’re about the only friend I have left with the old crew.”

“Jesse?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay?”

He stared at the floor. “I don’t know. Look, what if I needed one more favor?”

“What else do you need?”

“An address.”

“An address?”

“Right. To wherever the hell it is y’all plopped down this new Overwatch HQ.”

“Jesse, I don’t think-”

“I know. You were always a cautious one. Heck, your caution probably kept me alive more times than I can remember back in the old days.” He flexed the mechanics of his synthetic arm again and watched the fingers curl and straighten. “But I have to do this, Angela. I got a hunch.”

“Ah, yes. The infamous Jesse McCree ‘hunch’. We’re lucky I was so cautious back then. You and your hunches got you into bad situations more times than I can count.”

“And they got me out of just as many.”

“Yes… that they did, Jesse.”

They both fell quiet. McCree listened carefully to that silence, waiting it out, seeing it through to its conclusion.

Angela spoke only after a sigh to let him know of her disapproval.

“Do you have something to write with?”

He slid a pencil from the notebook’s rings and she gave him the address and he wrote it down and circled it.

“Thanks again, Angela. I reckon I’ll be seeing you soon. Try and make it so they don’t turn me away at the gates, will you?”

“Jesse?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Probably somethin’ stupid.”

“Just don’t get yourself in trouble, okay?”

“You know me.”

“All too well.”

At that he grinned. “Take care, Angela. I’ll see you when I see you.”

He ended the call and rifled through the notebook till he reached pages stiff and unfamiliar to probing fingers. He found the name he was looking for towards the back and dialed and listened to it ring.

“Yes?”

“It’s Jesse McCree.”

Silence, then, “What do you need?”

“Calling in that favor you owe me. I need a private plane and no questions asked. If you can get it set up tonight, I’d appreciate it a great deal. I have a long way to go, and a pretty lady who needs my help.”

After, he stood on his back porch again watching the sky fill with ink and the wind rustling the hair of distant trees. He adorned his holster and slid the new revolver in and out to get a feel for how it moved. Then he packed a single bag and slung it over his shoulder and went out to stand at the end of the cobblestone path leading down from his ranch. A car picked him up shortly after. It left a cloud of dirt swirling under the moonlight as it barreled down the road and carried McCree towards the next step of his adventure, to that ever elusive and always alluring woman with no name.

 


	7. Chapter 7

When his driver let him out and drove off, McCree stood swallowed in the shadow of a giant. It rose up out of the red clay and baked sand of Dorado, Mexico, a fortress of metal and stone. Looming walls, twenty feet high. Ramparts manned with soldiers and automated turrets. Lookout posts every hundred feet, like little glass caps crowning laddered stalks grown wild. ‘Temporary outpost’. Those were the words Angela had used when she’d given him the address. McCree didn’t think there was anything ‘temporary’ looking about it.

A guard eyed him with silent suspect at the gates. McCree stood and a machine cast a light over him and took a retina scan. After his identity was cleared, the locks popped and the gate slid back on a magnetic rail. McCree tipped his hat and walked through. Before him lay a long stretch of graveled path barreling down a straight line for the outpost’s central building. McCree followed it, watching as soldiers-in-training ran an exercise course at the commands of a barking lieutenant on either side. Further along he saw more soldiers testing weapons down a firing range. Further still and there were drones and omnics being programmed for battle. He felt like he’d walked right into one of Jack Morrison’s military fantasies.

The front of the central outpost was all glass done up in fancy architectural curves and patterns. A receptionist sat at a desk inside. McCree walked up and gave his name and they punched it into a projected keyboard laying like a cloud beneath their fingertips. The receptionist smiled and rose and led him deeper into the compound, where ‘Dr. Ziegler’ was expecting him. He grinned at that. Dr. Ziegler. It sounded awfully professional.

Angela’s quarters were empty when they arrived and McCree was left to wait for her alone. He sauntered about the small room, looking over the woman’s tidy and organized belongings. At her desk he found a photo framed and propped up and spun it around to look. There behind that oblong of glass, the past lay sprawled before him. It was a photo of Overwatch from the old days. He and Angela were on the far right, smiling and looking like a couple of kids fresh out of school. Jack was near the center, and even the old man looked happy. Gabriel stood down at the other end, the only relic frozen in those distant annals of lost time that didn’t seem pleased to be there. McCree looked briefly at each of them, Reinhardt and Torbjorn and Ana with her young daughter. He smiled bitterly and spun the photo back around, eager to turn all those remote and ancient eyes away from him.

“I always liked that photo.”

He looked back to the voice and for a moment it was that same young giggling blond from the photo. Then he blinked and Angela the grown woman replaced her.

“We all looked so happy back then,” she said with a smile. 

McCree returned the gesture. “Simpler times.”

She looked him over. “Still wearing a cowboy hat.”

“Yeah, well. Sorta grew on me.”

Angela stared. Then she laughed and stepped into him and wrapped her arms around him in embrace. McCree used one arm, tentatively, to hug back, and felt every bit of that gangly, dopey, youth he’d glimpsed in the photograph. “Good to see ya, Angela. Thanks for everything.”

“Thank me after you’ve seen your mystery woman,” she said, pulling away to look him in the eyes. “Jesse, you know you can’t just take her out of here, right?”

“‘Course I know that. I just want to see her. Then I’m gonna have me a talk with Jack. Is he here?”

“He’s here. Don’t start trouble, alright?”

“You know me. Have I ever been one to start trouble?”

“Jesse…”

“Well, maybe a little.” He grinned. “From time to time.”

“From time to time. Right. How’s the arm holding up?”

He raised his mechanical arm and rolled his fingers to show off its dexterity. “Like a God-damned charm. You were a miracle worker back in those days, doc. Weren’t for you, I’d be the one-armed man.”

A hint of mischief in her comely visage. “Maybe I should’ve left you like that. One less arm to stir trouble. Come on. I’ll take you to her.”

They left her quarters and walked alongside one another down a long and barren hall, shoes clapping against the polished linoleum floor and echoing away to silence, like all that missing time that lay between them. They were distant at first, but gradually pulled together at the shoulders. They spoke softly and in cautious tones, whispers birthed and consumed in the same quiet instant.

“You made Jack angry.”

“Jack’s always angry, Angela. And what is this place, anyway? What’s he got soldiers training for down here in Mexico? Expectin’ a war?”

“I don’t know what he’s expecting. It’s Jack. He lives for war now.”

They were quiet for a bit.

“I saw Gabriel. Or whatever he calls himself now.”

“Oh?”

“Him and Jack.” He shook his head. “Seein’ ‘em one after the other like that. It’s got me all wistful. Hard not to think of the both of ‘em as just two old assholes in masks, though.”

She said nothing, but he stole a glance and saw that notorious Angela Ziegler scowl of reproach. He caught a laugh in his throat before it could get him in trouble.

“What is this woman to you anyway, Jesse?”

“I don’t know.”

“No? You’ve come a long way to see her. She must be something.”

“She’s… like me, I guess.”

“Like you?”

“Hard to explain, Angela. She’s a loner. Dances to her own beat. Calls her own shots. That sort of thing. Not like I have to tell you, but I can relate.”

Angela nodded and walked on a bit before asking, “Do you know her name? Her real name, I mean. Obviously, ‘Sombra’ is an alias.”

He shrugged. “That I do not know.”

“When I asked her, she told me ‘Gertrude’, but I doubt she was being sincere. Jesse? Why are you smiling?”

“Was I smilin’?” He laughed. “Guess it’s just a funny name, is all.”

She eyed him dubiously. “You’re acting strange. You know, you were always the one person I could count on to tell me the truth.”

“Ang, I am telling you the truth. I don’t know what’s come over me lately. Been sittin’ around doin’ nothing for too long, I guess. Now a little adventure has come my way, and a chance to do the right thing for once. If I can help this woman, hell, maybe she’d even be part of the team someday.”

“And what team is that?”

“Yours.”

“Not ‘ours’?”

“I ain’t Overwatch material. Not anymore.”

Her hand found his arm and gripped him gently. “I worry about you sometimes, Jesse.”

“Yeah, well, you always did worry too much. Not a thing in this world I can’t handle with a well-placed bullet.”

“I know that. The only times I’ve seen you in real trouble is when you run into a problem you _can’t_ shoot. And that’s what I’m worried you’re going to find.”

They exchanged glances but said nothing and went the rest of the way in silence.

Her cell was nestled away down a long dark corridor and through a guarded pair of heavy doors that used the same electrical magnet system the rest of the compound seemed to run on. Angela had the guard open the doors and they stood shouldered together as the locks ran back and the things lifted like steel curtains into the jamb. Their passing revealed a glass enclosure inside a large room, spotlit from every angle like the prisoner inside was going to vanish if she could just find a shadow. Angela leaned against the wall and nodded him forth and McCree offered a tip of his hat in thanks for allowing him the privilege to go alone.

She sat in the glass cube atop a cot in orange prison garb, shackles around her wrists and ankles tethering them to one another. McCree neared and stepped from shadows into the strip of light that trimmed the outer rim of the cube’s perimeter. His movement caught her eye and she looked up and smiled broadly to show him her pretty white teeth.

“I knew you’d come,” she said, rising. “I’d wave, but…” She jingled her chains, showing him her hands stuck down at her waist.

He drank in the sight of her. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours yet and he felt his old heart drumming along steadily back in her presence. “Darlin’… how you holdin’ up?”

She sauntered to him. “Orange was never really my color. Do you still think I’m a ‘beautiful woman’ as you said, McCree, even like this?” She put her palms against the glass at her hip.

He reached up and did the same, trying to feel her through her cell wall. “I most certainly do.”

She glanced to the entrance. “Who’s the blond waiting in the doorway? She looks sad. A girlfriend?”

“More like a sister.”

“She’s pretty.”

“Might be, but I reckon I got someone else on my mind.”

Eyes watching up at him from the other side of the glass, dark and beautiful. The curve of her upper lip. Bare neck and copper collarbone exposed above the prison garb. Her palms, flattened and warm.

“Darlin’, I’m going to get you out of there.”

At that, she only went on smiling.

“I’ll figure it out. Talk with Jack. Work up a deal or somethin’.”

“Mi valiente vaquero.” Each word fell from her lips so soft, like freshly powdered snow coating the ground between them. She leaned close to the little holes that ran the cube for air and said, “McCree, there is something you can do for me right now.”

“Name it, honey.”

“They took all my possessions away from me. My bag and my gear. I had a little crucifix with me.” She lowered her eyes. “Mi Padre’s. It would mean the world to me if I could hold it while I’m in here. For strength. But they denied me even that simple pleasure. Could you…?”

“A crucifix? Darlin’, I didn’t figure you a religious sort.”

“It’s not that, McCree. It has sentimental value.”

“Alright. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Gracias.” Ever so lightly, she kissed the glass. It took a great deal of effort to pry himself away.

Before he reached the door, he pulled off his hat and kept it low at his side and then fell in with Angela as they walked back out past the guard.

“The two of you looked very happy to see one another,” Angela said after they’d put some distance on the room, two quiet figures moving on phantom treads back through the facility. She stole a glance at him and asked, “Jesse, are you falling for that woman?”

To which he could find no satisfactory answer and so replied with a silence that lay heavy between them for the rest of their walk.

They parted at Angela’s office, and she informed him she’d set up a meeting with Jack within the hour. He was guided by a soldier down to a guest quarter to wait and then left alone. He rocked on his heels, watching the escort depart, then McCree looked around and sauntered off down the hall himself. He showed perfunctory smiles to those who watched him passing, moving like he had a purpose so as not to be questioned. He went down halls and up others. He peeked in rooms and leaned around corners. He asked, casually, of passing soldiers the general direction of the way he might be heading. Some of the younger ones asked for an autograph. Apparently, the name of ‘Jesse McCree’, gunslinger of old, still carried some weight around these parts. He used that to his advantage and squeezed the information he needed out of a doe-eyed boy who kept calling him ‘Sir’. He felt old in the kid’s company and anxiously departed when he had what he needed.

The barracks where they kept evidence and confiscated belongings was deep in the eastern wing of the facility. McCree entered through double doors and stood surveying the place. Empty now, the last red streaks of daylight clawing at the windows that comprised one of its walls. He moved about the room as if it were his duty, and when he came to a door sectioning off a smaller chamber, he stopped and lingered, peeking through the glass. There, lying forlorn beside a rack of weaponry, he spotted Sombra’s bag. He looked around and saw no one and entered.

It didn’t take much rifling about to find it. The defined shape of a cross was poking its contours against the dark fabric and he unzipped the pouch and reached in. He came up with a little brown cross dangling from a chain and turned it over in his hands. He unlatched the chain and put it back and then zipped the pouch, stood, and pocketed the crucifix. He nudged the heavy bag back against the wall with his foot and left.

When he found his way back to the cell, he slipped his hat off again and tucked the brim beneath his waistband on his hip and covered it with his shirt. When he rolled up to the guard at the door, he patted his bare head and shrugged. “Forgot my hat, bud. Angela told me to just come back and grab it.”

The soldier regarded him only briefly before unlocking the door and allowing him back in. McCree smiled his thanks and went.

“Darlin,” he said as he returned to the glass. He fished the crucifix out of his pocket and held it to the hole. “Whatever it means to you, I hope it helps.”

She moved to the glass and held her shackled hands out. Carefully, he dropped the crucifix into her waiting palms.

“Muchas gracias, mi valiente vaquero.” Her fist closed around it. “Mi salvacion.”

He lingered, his feet rooted to the ground, his eyes weighed like anchors upon her face. “I’m meeting with Jack now. I’ll see what I can do.”

“McCree,” she stopped him when he turned to leave. “Whatever happens from here. You _do_ have my gratitude. Sincerely. You’re an honest man, hombre honesto, and that’s the most endearing quality a man can have.”

“You’re talkin’ like its the end, honey.” He pulled his hat from his waistband and tucked it over his head and grinned. “You underestimate my negotiatin’ abilities. I can be a stubborn old bull when I need to.”

“Si…” She stared at him from beyond the glass, a sad little smile sat upon her lips.

“I shall return,” he told her, nodded, and left.

By the time he and Angela were sitting in her office waiting for Jack, the day was being draped with dark velvet curtains outside. He sat watching it through the window, stars poking up here and there over this foreign and mysterious land of Mexico. Somewhere far off, a coyote sang into the sky, a long and shrill note that scratched the ceiling of the world. Angela watched beside him and he looked over to her with a grin.

“Feels like we’re teenagers again, waitin’ to get reamed out by Captain Morrison, don’t it?”

A wistful smile. “I never got in trouble, Jesse. If I was in the waiting room, it was because _you_ got me put there.” She laid her hand on his arm and gave it a playful squeeze. “Don’t fight with him. For my sake, alright?”

“I’ll try and show him mercy.” At that, they shared a grin.

Jack came in not long after, all drawn up straight and austere, his visor peeled back so McCree could look into the old whites of his eyes that streaked with blood red lines, crow’s feet blossoming at the corners. He looked down his nose at the two of them and McCree couldn’t help but squirm. He really did feel like a kid in trouble then. In some ways, Jack was the closest thing he’d ever had to a father. The old soldier threw down a sheet of paper upon the desk before them. He and Angela leaned forward, a curious couple matched in their movements, and looked it over. It was a phone number and a location, somewhere back in El Paso.

“That supposed to mean somethin’ to me, Jack?”

“It should.” His voice graveled with age. “That’s the motel you were staying at with your little lovebird.”

He looked up and met the man’s eyes. “And?”

“That anonymous call-in yesterday? The one I told you about that led me to your location? It’s signal was blocked. Hacked and encoded. I found that strange, so I had the boys down in the lab work it out. The call traced back to your motel. Your very room, in fact.”

He frowned. “The hell’s that supposed to mean? I didn’t call myself in, Jack.”

“No. _She_ did. Sombra. She called the location in, Jesse, and now you show up and I have to tell you, I’m feeling awfully suspicious at the moment.”

“That don’t make any sense. Why the hell would she _want_ to be caught?”

“I don’t know. But you need to tell me what you’re doing here, kid, and you need to tell me now.”

He tried to stand but Angela’s hand gripped his arm, pleading him not to. “I ain’t tryin’ to spring her, if that’s what you’re implying, Jack. I don’t know why she would call herself in, but I’m damned sure there’s-”

A sound permeating all, drowning the world in its noise. A low, guttural, liquid explosion, like a bowling ball dropped into a pool and swallowed to the very bottom. It lingered and drew taught like a rubber band stretched to the breaking point then snapped and a crisp shattering, fallen icicles on fresh pavement, spread itself over the facility like a web.

The lights went out, entombing the three of them in absolute dark. Their eyes wide and white in the moonlight, lungs and hearts filling the void. Ten seconds passed and the backup generators hummed to life. A single safety light blinked into existence, cold and dim to conserve energy. It splayed on the floor between them, a spotlight accusatory in its relentless shining.

“Jesse, what the hell have you done,” Jack growled.

McCree stared at him, numb.

The old soldier put two fingers to his ear and barked into the communicator there. “Report, ASAP. What the hell just happened?”

The voice on the other end, static and thin. “ _Not sure, Captain Morrison. Appears we were hit with an EMP.”_

“Not possible, soldier. There’s a cancellation field around the perimeter a mile wide. If we were hit by an EMP, it would’ve had to of come from inside.”

“ _It did, sir. Tracing it now. Looks like it came from the barracks. Heading in._ ” A pause. “ _It’s the prisoners bag, Captain. I’m cutting it open. Looks like there’s something sewn into the fabric. Yes. Sir, it’s definitely the bag. She’s got a device in here, all spread through the bag’s interior. Looks like it would’ve have to have been triggered with some remote. Wait. Movement. It’s her! It’s-”_ Something clattered and thumped on the other end of the line and it went dead.

Jack’s face contorted with anger as he looked down his nose. “Jesse, you dumbass. What have you done?”

But McCree’s eyes were distant with remembering. A remote to trigger the EMP. He saw his hand dropping the crucifix, saw it falling slow down the length of the glass cage until it landed in Sombra’s palm with enormous weight in this bygone vision of the tainted past. Her fist closing around it. Her smile. The words rolling off her tongue with ease, ‘ _mi salvacion’_. 

Jack’s fingers were back at his ear. “Someone get your ass to the barracks. We’ve got a loose prisoner and probably a man down.”

A new voice played through the communicator. “ _Captain, I’ve got three men. Breaching the barracks now.”_ A pause, a shuffling of feet. “ _Private Holmes is down. Unconscious but alive. The prisoner’s bag is empty, sir. She has her stealth suit. I repeat: she has her stealth suit._ ”

“Everyone switch to infrared.”

A different voice piped through a separate channel. “ _Captain Morrison, there was a breach in the central control room. Sir, she hacked our database. I’d never thought it possible to do so fast, but she did it. Took down our encodings like they were a joke._ ”

“What did she get, private?”

“ _Everything, sir. She copied our entire database. Names, places, operations. …she has it all._ ”

“Find her.”

“ _Yes, sir._ ”

Jack stood in the darkness of the room, a shadowed silhouette separated only by that lonely spotlight running on the backup generator’s whim. His eyes were heavy as stones. McCree felt pinned to his seat beneath them. Angela’s hand stayed on his arm. The silence was deafening.

A static voice broke it. “ _Sir, one last thing to report. When the power went down, before the generators kicked in, something entered the facility._ ”

“Entered!? What the hell entered?”

“ _See for yourself, Captain. I’ll pipe the video feed into Dr. Ziegler’s office._ ”

Angela leaned forward and thumbed a switch on her desk. A projected screen rose out of a lens. Nothing but grey snow till the feed pumped in, then the three of them watched. A shot of the walls lining the perimeter. The power went out and darkness fell and then something appeared atop the ramparts. Faint in its distant vision but distinct. A black smoke, tunneling up from the ground. Then a figure conjured itself from that smoke in dark attire and a white mask. The feed died before they got a good look.

“Gabriel,” the name dropped from Angela’s lips as if the word itself was a ghost.

Jack punched the desk hard enough to shake it. The framed photo of Overwatch fell to the ground and a shrill crack of glass filled the room. He put fingers to his ear. “Talon is inside the facility. I repeat, Talon is inside the facility. Gabriel Reyes. Man the perimeter, set turrets to infrared. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out. Orders… shoot to kill. That includes the woman.”

“No.” McCree rose to his feet, throwing Angela’s hand off him. He stepped into Jack and raised a finger. “You call that god damn order off, Jack. I’m warning you.”

Jack’s eyes burned into him briefly till the visor clasped around him and hid his face behind his mask. He pulled his assault rifle from its holster and gripped the barrel.

“She played you, you dumbass,” Jack said with a shake of his head. “Don’t you understand that, Jesse? She lured you here and, I don’t know how, but had you help her escape. Now she robbed us, all our information, and her Talon friends are here to get her out.”

“No.” He shook his head. “She ain’t with Talon, Jack. I know it. They’ve been tracking her. She took information from them, too. They probably want her dead before she can give anything up to Overwatch. Jack, if Gabriel finds her, he’ll kill her. I’m sure of it.”

“Then he’ll save me the trouble.”

Angela rose and held him back, the only thing that kept him from hitting his old mentor.

Jack went to the door and turned his head to glance back. “The two of you stay here. You’re both under temporary lockdown. Sorry, Angela, but you’ve always had a soft spot for this impulsive hothead, and that puts you in collusion with him.” His visor bore into McCree. “How did she do it, Jesse? Did she tell you some sob story? Plead her heart out? Trick you into caring about her? Or was it something else. Was it the promise of adventure? The old ‘damsel in distress’ for the cowboy to come save? How did she manipulate you so damn easily? …was it sex?”

Every inch of McCree shook alive. His skin felt hot, itchy. His metal fist was balled so tight he heard the mechanics whining under the stress. 

“She’s a criminal. A hacker. A thief.” He readied his weapon. “And now I have to put her down like one.” He left.

McCree watched the emptiness where Jack had stood, unable to move, speak, think. He only glared and then reached into his vest and pulled out his revolver. His thumb worked back the hammer. The clicks it made eased him up some.

“Jesse,” Angela cooed, laying her hands on his arms. “I’m sorry.”

He didn’t trust himself to say anything back. He looked at the fallen photograph laying face down, dead on the floor, and picked it up and set it back on the desk. It was the same as before, only now a long and jagged splinter ran through the glass, cutting the young Jesse McCree housed within in halves. He stared at it then spun it away.

“She ain’t Talon,” he croaked with a slow shake of his head. “Maybe she did use me. Maybe I am a damn fool who listens to his heart more than his head. Maybe. But, Angela, she ain’t Talon. Gabriel will kill her. And it sounds like so will Jack. I have to get to her first.”

Angela stared. “I suppose I can’t talk you out of it.”

“You suppose correct.”

She went to the wall and slid her fingers across a panel there. A section flipped around and revealed her Caduceus staff. She took it and held it to her chest. “Then I’m here.”

Despite it all, he managed a grin. “I owe ya, Ang.”

“More than you know.”

Together they went to the door and opened it and peaked out. The facility was dark, shadows laying everywhere in heavy opaque rectangles. Emergency lights flooded little yellow cones against their blackness. The sound of soldier’s boots beating linoleum. A faint shout in the distance. And somewhere amidst it all, a woman hunted by two old men that wanted her dead. McCree stepped into the shadows, his gun at the ready, his thoughts kept miles away from the painful reality that he’d been played like a marionette at the end of strings dangled from a nameless woman’s skilled fingers.

 


	8. Chapter 8

He could see her up there on the ramparts, running in the dark, a quiet wind blowing along on hurried feet. Whatever infrared sensory information the soldiers and drones were receiving, it wasn’t doing the trick. Sombra vanished here and appeared there and somewhere in between two men were on the ground unconscious. A burst of wild fire. A movement like liquid shadow. A shout and a third man joined his fallen kin. She was already up and running when her stealth suit sheathed her again. It cloaked over her and left a blurred afterimage where she’d disappeared, like a wraith imprinted upon that black canvas of night sky, pinned there amongst a silent congregation of watchful stars. Somewhere further along the ramparts, another man yelled, another man down. Fallen soldiers in her trail like footprints.

“Your girl is talented, Jesse.” Angela’s voice beside him amidst the cover of an outpost in the facility’s training yard.

“She ain’t killin’ ‘em,” McCree said. “Just knockin’ ‘em on their ass. I told you she wasn’t the enemy.”

“Perhaps she’s minimizing the damage in case she gets caught.”

McCree raised his gun up to his shoulder and shook his head and spat. “She ain’t gonna get caught. At least not by them. Come on.”

They went quietly around the perimeter and stuck to the shadows so as to avoid the eyes of hunting soldiers. Their feet were little more than hushes against the macadam. Their posture shrunk down for stealth. Angela stayed at his heels with her staff and McCree led on with his single action revolver. Its silver inlays shone now and again with reflected moonlight. They traced the outpost in a semi-circle, looking to cut the fleeing woman off. Halfway around and they passed a stable and garage shouldered up together in the facility’s rear. Inside, the comforting sounds of hooves and neighing.

“What’s Jack got horses down here for?”

“Coincidentally enough, for EMPs. The vehicles are all electric. Your girl’s device probably has their engines going haywire. If she makes it out of the outpost and survives the automated turrets, there’s no catching her except on foot or on horseback.”

“Good to know.”

“Don’t get any ideas, cowboy.” He could hear Angela’s grin in her words and appreciated her for it.

The clatter of gunfire drew their eyes south, where that moonlit phantom was fighting her way through another blockade. McCree could see her athletic silhouette atop the wall, twisting and turning, there and gone. More soldiers fell like bowling pins. A spray of fire peppered the sky and then went mute. The silhouette raised a claw and wiggled its fingers and a drone closing in on the chaos had its wiring reconfigured. It took aim at the soldiers instead until they were forced to put it down in a hail of gunfire. By the time they had, the phantom had slipped through their grasp, cutting her way deeper into the night.

“She’s something else,” Angela mused with a shake of her head.

McCree sighed. “Yeah. Somethin’ else.” 

They got moving. Further down the wall they were halted up again when a shattering of glass drew their eyes upwards to one of the lookout towers in time to watch as a soldier came flying out in a spray equal parts blood and glass. He plummeted the thirty-odd-feet and fell dead with a flat thud in the yard. In the jagged crater he’d been thrown from, a black apparition moved briefly across the wreckage. Too thick to be the woman with no name. Too cruel to be anyone else but the reaper.

“Gabriel,” McCree muttered and tightened his grip on his revolver.

An orange ladder led up to the ramparts further along the wall and when they came across it they slipped inside its caged chamber and hurried up its rails, feet clicking like metronomes on the ascent. Once crested, McCree felt the wind raking hard and wild up here some twenty feet from the ground. He looked out over the parapets and glimpsed a dark and foreign world with its gaping maw shadowed and hungry beyond. Angela fell in beside him and they followed the rampart’s curved path underfoot in stride.

Jack lay crouched in ambush not much further down. His visor shone like a line of glowing blood in the night. Above either shoulder, drones hummed like wasps, steel cherubs keeping their mechanical vigil. McCree and Angela came hurrying up behind him and the drones turned to spot them first. Twin barrels hung from their bellies and took aim. Jack’s visor followed their lead, burning its way across the gap.

“I thought I told you two to stay put. Does anyone around here listen to my God-damned orders anymore?”

“Can’t let you kill her, Jack.”

“That isn’t up to you anymore, kid.”

McCree thumbed back the hammer of his gun. “I got six friends here that say different.”

“Then they’d better be faster than the twenty-five with me.” Jack patted the magazine of his assault rifle as they stared into one another.

Angela stepped between them with her hands up placatingly.

“The both of you, stop it! Has nothing changed in all these years? You’re still at each other’s throats like children!”

“He started it,” McCree said.

“Jesse…” Her scowl took him back twenty years in an instant and he felt himself shrink away from it the same as teenage McCree would have.

“Yeah, alright.” He lowered his gun.

“ _Captain Morrison,_ ” a static voice dripping for Jack’s headset. “ _She’s coming your way. Took down Davidson and Michaels. Disabled a turret with her hand somehow. We couldn’t stop her._ ”

“Let her go. I’m here waiting.”

A pole rose up from the facility’s central station and spat harsh white light all around the perimeter in oscillation. Everything its cold eyes touched had an elongated shadow thrown from its feet. It swept Jack and lit him up bright and then moved away, circling around, coming back to find him again. His drones pulsed in that light like dying stars. Mexico was a quiet blanket draped over all. Then her footsteps in approach, falling like the soft pattering of McCree’s heart as he watched.

Jack stood with his assault rifle shouldered. His drones fell low and their barrels slid like stingers from their bellies. McCree took an instinctive step forward right into Angela’s arm and she held him back and pleaded with her eyes. The trick worked once. It wouldn’t work again. He batted her arm aside and stepped forward with his gun level to his shoulder and eyed down the sight.

A trap had been laid across the top of the ramparts, unavoidable to any traveler in passing. When Sombra hit it, a curtain of electric distortion rose like a geyser and washed over her and stripped away her stealth camouflage. She winced and fell and yelped and the sound reached through McCree’s ears and pierced his vital organs all at once. A gunslinger’s instinct took over. He flattened out his revolver at his hip and fanned the hammer three times. The first shot fell one of the drones, the second clipped the other’s wing and sent it into a tailspin. The third took Jack in the back of his leg, right across the calf. McCree’s aim was true. The bullet did not enter his flesh, but it most certainly fell him to a knee.

Sombra went splaying out on her hands and knees and lay flat on her belly panting as a squadron of soldiers beat feet behind her in chase. Jack growled like the old dog he was and paid McCree only a brief and wrathful glance before focusing back on his target. He drew up and sighted down the barrel. McCree fanned the hammer again and his fourth bullet chewed into the assault rifle’s body, disabling it. Jack spun on him. The old soldier’s visor seemed more red than it had been. Beside him, one of the fallen drones sputtered and died and black plumes rose from its metal corpse.

The central spotlight washed over them and Sombra was looking up, gritting her teeth. When the light came full circle for another pass she was already gone, melded into the shadows from whence she came.

Jack looked to her empty position and then rounded on McCree. His breaths heaved in his chest. His hands were weaponized fists at his sides.

McCree held his ground.

A drone came buzzing over from the other side of the yard and a fifth fan of his hammer fell the thing dead before it even breached the wall.

“You countin’, Jack? I’ve got one shot left ‘fore I have to reload. I’d rather not clip your leg again with it, so why don’t you just stand down, old man.”

“You shot me.”

“Grazed you more than anything.”

“She used you like a puppet and you’re still trying to protect her,” Jack said, moving another step closer. “You really are an idiot, Jesse. I’ve called you that a lot of times since I’ve known you, but I don’t think I’ve ever meant it this much.”

“Don’t, Jack.”

But Jack already had. The old soldier lowered his shoulder and charged and Angela couldn’t get between them in time to prevent his tackle. They tangled and fell back and McCree’s revolver slipped out of his hand and went sliding across the concrete trailing sparks. Jack was on top of him, his strength and agility, seemingly, forgetting his age. His fist found McCree’s eye socket and blacked his vision. McCree shook it off in time to catch a second punch and throw it off course and grab handfuls of Jack’s vest to wrench him aside and get on equal footing. Jack hit him again, this time across the jaw, and McCree slumped back to his ass. When Jack made to capitalize, though, he kicked the soldier’s legs out from under him, scrambled around to his back, and grabbed him in a headlock.

“Stop this!” Angela commanded, trying to pry them apart.

Jack threw his head back and McCree’s nose took the impact. It loosened his hold and sent him reeling back and then Jack was up and charging again. He roared and grabbed the man by his shoulders and they both went down a second time. An exchange of punches in short range. No advantage gained. Then McCree took a hard blow across his temple and countered as he fell back with a stiff jab for Jack’s jawline. They both ended up sprawled out panting. Jack moved towards him and McCree drove the heel of his boot across the soldier’s chest, putting him back down.

Movement caught his eye far away. McCree rolled to his elbows and looked off across the yard to the ramparts rising from the facility’s opposite end. With each pass of the spotlight’s oscillation, he saw a chase ensuing in strobed snapshots. A quick woman on nimble feet with a damaged stealth suit. Behind her, a black apparition with shotguns twinned at the end of its arms in pursuit. Sombra reached a dead end at a locked gate and threw her hand up to hack it. Gabriel stalked forth relentless, closing in, an eclipse coming to smother the light.

McCree scrambled for his gun. Jack got hold of his ankle to try and drag him back into the fight but he wrenched free and went stumbling on hands and knees to his fallen revolver. He snatched it and lay flat again, taking aim across the yard, his arm extended, eye trained down the sight. A revolver was never meant for such distance. He couldn’t line up the shot. 

“Angela.”

“Jesse?”

“Hit me with the good stuff. The blue stuff. Do it quick.”

She’d always been a sister to him, loyal and caring. Of that, little had changed over the years. Without hesitation she slid beside him and her Caduceus staff raised up, the head working counter clockwise to breath a faint blue light down over him, into him. McCree felt his senses spark up all at once. His aim grew truer. His eyes those of a hawk’s. His focus sharp as new spurs.

He trained the sights on Gabriel just as that distant ghost was in firing range behind Sombra with his shotguns. The light strobed. With each pass, the predator closed on its prey. McCree counted in time with the light drawing slow breaths and then let the sixth and final bullet of his revolver fly. It cut the world in halves with a flat pop and then found its mark. Gabriel took the shot in his thigh and went down in a black heap.

Sombra hacked the gate’s locks and looked back at Reaper’s crumpled body. Briefly, she looked out across the yard and her eyes found McCree’s. Even across all that dark space between them he could see those soft lapis irises like bellflowers entombed in her pretty countenance. The spotlight flicked across her twice. She’d vanished on the third pass.

McCree rose up and made back for the way they’d come to cut her off.

“Jesse!” Jack growled, fighting up to his feet. “We’re not done yet, kid!”

“Make sure he’s alright, Ang, will you?” McCree said and didn’t bother sticking around for the reply. He hurried off down the rampart. As he ran, he flung the cylinder out of his revolver and dumped six empty shells onto the concrete and slotted in a fresh set of cartridges from a moon clip in his ammo pouch. He spun the cylinder and snapped it closed, the weight sitting right in his hand again all loaded up.

Halfway around the facility’s backside, a shadowed gap lay where the spotlight’s oscillating eye could not reach. It was there McCree shouldered up against a concrete barrier and grew still and patient. She was coming. He could hear her feet, her breaths, her eagerness to escape. He let her draw close then spun out of hiding and grabbed her shoulders and took her against him to still her struggles.

Her face contorted with apoplectic desperation. Eyes flittering. Arms working against his. Then she saw him and the fight drained from her like a deflated balloon. 

“McCree?”

It wasn’t till that moment the weight of it all hit him. The fact he’d been lied to, deceived, used. Her voice sounded mechanical. He second-guessed every movement upon her face as an affectation. This wasn’t a woman in his hands, it was a mannequin. Not a person, just the hollow illusion of one.

His voice remained low and calm through sheer force of will.

“Was any damned thing you told me true?”

A grave expression befell her face when she heard the tone of his voice. She stared at him, lips set in a hard line.

“Some of it.”

“How many lies?”

“A few. Only necessary ones.”

He couldn’t look her in the eye anymore. It was weakening his will to be angry. He took a breath and shook his head.

“What are you really after? What have you been using me to get to?”

“That one wasn’t a lie, McCree. I _am_ after truth, like I said. And right at this point, I needed a truth from Overwatch’s database. And now I have it. I’m so close, vaquero. So close to retrieving something Talon has hidden away from me.”

“Talon?”

“Why do you think your soldier friend has a facility down here in Mexico? There’s a hidden Talon outpost not far from here they’ve been scouting. I have its location now, vaquero. I’m going there to steal something that belongs to me. Something very important to me.”

He grimaced. “You ain’t nothin’ but lies and deceptions, ain’t you? Overwatch, Talon… who you gonna rope into this story next? The National Guard?”

She frowned. “I’m telling the truth, McCree.”

“Right. Truth. Like when you had me go get your ‘padre’s’ crucifix so you could detonate that EMP. True like that? Hell, I doubt you ever even had a father. Probably just fell out of some shadow’s ass and started your endless bullshittin’ right there and then in the crib.”

She wrestled an arm free and slapped him hard across the face before he could wrangle her up again. He stared at her as the blow tingled numb on his cheek.

“Don’t ever talk about mi padre. You don’t know, McCree. I wasn’t lying when I said I lost everything as a girl. Including him.”

The sincerity and hurt in her voice gave him pause. He looked at her in silence and with a great deal of effort he let her arms go.

“Run then,” he said with a gesture to the dark world beyond the wall. “Do what you do best, darlin’. Run off.”

“I warned you not to fall in love with me, McCree.”

“I don’t love you.”

“Yes you do. Some part of you, at least.” She reached up and laid a hand softly on his cheek where she’d slapped him. “And I also told you you knew how this would end. I run. I vanish. I hide. It’s what I am. Do you hate the shadow for slinking away from the light? No. Because it is the shadow’s nature to do so.” She looked deeply into his eyes. “But I am sorry for lying to you, McCree. Believe those words if nothing else tonight.” She stood on tiptoes to kiss his lips. She was warm and soft against him and he was helpless but to close his eyes and kiss her back.

When he opened them again, she was gone. The wind rustled his hair. The moon hung like a distant silver eye watching over his sudden solitude. He hooked his hands around his hips and looked out beyond the wall at nothing and nothing looked back at him. 

Jack and Angela were still atop the ramparts when he returned. Jack’s visor was peeled back. There was little fight left in his eyes and he looked very old beneath the eastern sky at it began to bleach grey with the coming dawn.

“She took down the automated turrets, Jesse,” Angela told him as he fell back in their company. “She probably slipped the wall and escaped.”

“Probably.”

Jack’s glare bore into him. “You’re one stupid bastard sometimes.”

“I know.”

Angela started to say something else when her eyes darted out beyond the wall. “Look!”

The three of them moved to the ramparts. Below the wall, the land fell away in a long slope till it flattened out some hundred feet down in a valley cut through with a river. Sombra was there. She ran at full sprint beside the river and behind her a convoy of trucks and armored jeeps rolled up on her. An omnic, the same kind McCree had blasted apart back in the hills north of his ranch, leaned out of one of the trucks and shouldered a gun. It fired and a net cast out from the barrel, spreading wide till it hit Sombra in the back and tangled her up in its mesh wiring. She collapsed to the earth in a roll of dirt and dust. The truck stopped and two omnics got out, grabbed her, and hauled her into the back. Behind the convoy, Gabriel materialized out of a black plume of smoke and hopped into the passenger’s side of a jeep. The vehicle’s driver had blue skin. Then the entire convoy rolled off towards the eastern horizon.

“God damnit.” Jack punched the parapets. “There goes all our information into the hands of the enemy.”

McCree eyed the convoy, judging its speed. “They’re movin’ pretty slow.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” Angela asked. “All of our vehicles are disabled. We can’t follow.”

“Jack, be straight with me. Are you scouting a Talon base somewhere out there?”

The old soldier’s silence was answer enough. Sombra had been telling the truth.

The sun was coming up in the east. McCree watched it. He drummed his fingers against his hip. He adjusted his hat atop his head. Everything seemed to play in slow motion against that incipient light clawing pale fingers over the horizon. Each breath drawn felt heavy in his chest. His mechanical arm hurt like hell even though that was impossible. He looked between Jack and Angela and saw them as they were twenty years earlier. His smile, wistful and bitter upon his lips at the same time.

“Open the gates,” he told them and headed for the ladder back down to ground level.

“What?”

“You heard me. Open them gates.” He glanced back at Jack. “You were right about me, Jack. Maybe you always been right about me. I was wasting away on my ranch. I think maybe I still am wasting away a little bit. But Jesse McCree, this here old cowboy… he’s got at least one adventure left in him.”

It was Angela who rushed to his side and took hold of him.

“Jesse, what are you going to do?”

He held her eyes. “Probably somethin’ stupid.”

He took the ladder against his palms and slid to the bottom. He went to the stable at the facility’s rear and threw back the big wooden doors barring entrance. Three beasts inside shadowed under the awning, hooves clopping at straw and dirt, the smell of horse manure. He walked to the first and laid his hand on the creature’s head. Hesitancy, dark eyes watching cautiously. The second horse, dappled black and white like a cow clopped nervously beneath his palm and batted its tail against the stall. He went to the third. Pale brown hair the color of sand. Eyes large and glassy black like distant planets peering out at him. A long mane of golden brown hair. Muscled thighs. When he put his palm against the creature’s muzzle, the horse did not stir in the slightest. He stared at the beast, silently asking for a partnership. A slight lowering of the creature’s head. McCree grinned.

He rode out with his mount bridled and saddled and spurred hard for the front gates. Both Jack and Angela were there, watching him come. He thought they were going to pen him in till the way forward cleared.

“I’m not coming to bail your ass out, kid,” Jack said as he passed.

“Ain’t askin’ ya to, Jack.”

“Don’t get yourself killed, Jesse,” said Angela.

To which he could only smile.

He was on the road East shortly after. The horse rode smooth on its strong legs and McCree hardly needed to spur it at all before the beast had broken into a full gallop. He followed the clouds of dust lifting faintly out of the horizon where the convoy barreled along. He kept a tight grip on the reins and his head low, his cowboy hat shielding his eyes from the rising light into which he rode. Red earth spread before him like a flood. The morning air was crisp and snapped his hair back as he squinted into the wind. He dug his heels against the horse’s sides and felt the weight of his loaded revolver drumming against him as they picked up speed. He rode on and faced the uncertain future before him without doubt or hesitation. Either it was to be his triumphant return to the status of hero…

…or it was the last ride of Jesse McCree, fool of fools, gunslinger of old.

 

 

 

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

He rode hard for the pale horizon and for the woman with no name. He was small, comparatively, against that rolling metal convoy of machinery and ghosts in which he chased. They awoke clouds of dust and dirt in their path and their tires left ruts upon Mexio’s belly like teeth marks. McCree was a single man on horseback, strung along at the convoy’s heels, spurring his mount faster and gaining ground with every gallop of the beast’s mighty stride. There were no roads wherever they were heading and the rough terrain slowed the vehicles enough that he could gradually close the gap between them. In his hand lay his revolver, chambered with certain death for those who might stand in his way.

“ _Hya!_ ” He shouted and dug his heels into his mount.

The horse neighed and dropped its head and beat the earth with hoofed feet. McCree bounced atop the saddle with his eyes squinted and sharp beneath the shadowed rim of his hat. Wind raked his face and his hair and played a deafening song into his ears. Each breath drawn brought a lungful of dust, but he tasted nothing. He was too close now. The man had receded. The gunslinger had awoke.

Morning rose before his eyes and with it came sunlight, laying orphaned upon the earth in streaks of gold that gilded all and bore witness to him, an estranged rider upon horseback in the shadow of a fleeing fleet as he neared.

Movement in the jeep at the convoy’s rear. Three omnics perched upon the seats, black as coal. Even the sunlight was swallowed in that ebony plating that was their skin. Their heads turned back his way and the blood red orifices of their eyes bore into him with cold indifferent curiosity. One fingered its ear and must’ve received orders. It looked to the other two and they sprang into action, climbing back into the jeep’s rear and leveling long-barreled rifles against their shoulders. McCree watched with the horse’s reigns gripped tight in balled fists.

The first omnic fired. A mesh net spread from the nozzle like a blossoming flower. McCree pulled hard on the reign in his left hand and the horse cut sharply in that direction. The net landed wide right and ate nothing but dirt. The second omnic fired and McCree jerked his mount back the other way and the results were the same. They loaded back up and took aim for another try but McCree swung out onto the edge of the convoy and left the machines no choice but to shift position. Two more shots came and two more shots missed against his deft and practiced riding skills and McCree was thankful for all the time he’d spent on a ranch in his youth.

The orders, apparently, changed. The omnics ditched their rifles and rummaged in the back seat. They drew up with something heavy between them. Some weaponry. It mounted on their shoulders and housed an array of barrels in a square metal casing. They took aim.

“Well, shit.”

McCree leveled his pistol and eyed down the sight. He fired before they could. His bullet chewed into the jeep’s front tire and the vehicle veered off from the convoy’s path, the driver wrestling with the wheel to steady them. McCree had other plans. He shot out the rear tire as well and the jeep sagged helplessly to one side. The driver cut hard back the other way and overcompensated. Gravity took over and yanked the whole thing into a death spin. It rolled across Mexico like a tumbleweed and found its end in the bottom of a dry riverbank, nothing then but dead metal and black smoke. McCree rode on.

He spurred nearer to the convoy, shorter now down one jeep, and something caught his eye. At the head of the line of vehicles a glint of sunlight sparkled like a distant constellation. He didn’t need to see it twice. McCree yanked hard on the reigns to get them out of the spider’s line of sight just as the morning filled with the thunderous roar of her sniper rifle. A clod of dirt geysered from the earth where her bullet landed just a few feet away. He swung behind the truck that made up the convoy’s new end and used it as cover to avoid Widow’s watchful eye as he drove them closer.

The truck’s bed was sheathed over with a beige tarpaulin. The rear flap tore away and revealed a half dozen omnics inside, watching balefully out at him from the shadows like he’d just stirred a hornet’s nest. They clustered around the edge of the truck and McCree raised his gun. They watched and lingered and then parted and from between their rank and file came a hoverbike. It slotted out through their numbers and fell from the back of the truck. Jets encased in circular plates at its belly breathed blue flame at the ground to keep it afloat. The omnic rider glanced back at McCree and cut the engine a bit to fall in line. McCree looked over and the omnic looked back. They rode as parallels beside one another, man and horse against machine and machine.

McCree took aim and fired. The omnic slid a baton from its hip and held it flat between them. From either side of its curved shaft, some metallic shielding fanned out wide. McCree’s bullet sunk in and did nothing else, then the omnic retracted the shielding back into the baton, swerved close to him, and prodded him with the weapon. A crackle of icy lightning jolted from the tip and McCree winced as electricity wracked through him from the point of impact. He reigned away to escape the attack and Widowmaker’s sights glinted again further ahead. He had no choice but to drive the horse back towards the hoverbike just as the spider sent another deafening boom of intended death his way. An explosion of dirt where the bullet landed, like a belch from the belly of Mexico’s underworld.

The omnic prodded him again with the baton. McCree got his leg up and kicked it aside and tried another shot. The shielding slid out and blocked it and slid back in again just as quick and the hoverbike cut into him to take out the legs of his horse. McCree grit his teeth and reared up on the reigns to pull them out of the way. The bike cut right across the front of their path and then the engines whined as its driver decelerated to stay even. McCree fanned the hammer twice, emptying his last two bullets at the bike itself but the omnic watched through its red orifice and blocked again with its shield.

McCree held the revolver to his side and snapped open the cylinder. He dumped the casings to the ground where they were lost in a trail of dust and then slotted in a fresh set from his ammo pouch. He snapped the cylinder closed and leveled it against his hip just as the hoverbike came barreling for him. He fanned the hammer five times. The omnic got its shield up but the weight and force of the bullets rocked the baton backwards and then ripped it out of its owner’s hand. The omnic looked at its empty fist and then looked at McCree and then its head exploded with the sixth and final shot. The hoverbike sidled off driverless and crashed against a cluster of sunbaked rocks where it went up in a firework display of smoke and ruin. The destruction was close enough for McCree to feel the heat on his cheek as he pulled them away from the wreckage and reloaded his gun.

The omnic’s kin inside the truck didn’t seem happy with the results. They watched and shifted about like a nest of metal snakes poised to strike. One pushed through the center with an assault rifle. It peppered a spray of fire in his direction and McCree veered wide as bullets chewed a line across the ground. He fired for the truck’s tires, but this vehicle adorned mud flaps like a skirt from its hind quarters and rolled on eight wheels. His trick wouldn’t work. Widowmaker’s scope, glinting. He cursed and steered behind the truck again before she took his head off. 

Six omnics in the rear of the truck. Six bullets. He leaned back in the saddle to eye them as the central machine readied its assault rifle. McCree glanced skyward. Not quite high noon, but close enough. He breathed deep and called on the gunslinger to guide his hand. His palm fell with great weight and precision, six times, the bullets chambering and exploding from the barrel in a staccato roll of gunfire, the climax of a symphonic piece of music, a singer screeching towards her orchestral crescendo. Metal heads detonated in rhythm and put percussion to the song. Six pops, six disabled machines, six corpses strung about the truck in a black steel graveyard. Then the smell of gun smoke tunneling up McCree’s nose, a scent pungent and thick with victory.

He reloaded and spurred for the truck. When he was in grabbing distance of the handles there, he leaned close to the horse’s ear and whispered for the creature to stay with him. He stroked the beast’s mane, reached out, and pulled himself into the back. He stepped over his fallen foes and slid aside the window hatch that divided the front and rear compartments of the vehicle. An omnic driver there glanced over at him.

“‘Scuse me,” McCree said, took aim at the dashboard, and unloaded into it with his revolver. Smoke and metal flew in equity and sirens blared from the failing electronics. The omnic looked from him to the dashboard and back. McCree tipped his hat and slid the hatch shut. He whistled for his mount at the truck’s edge and when the horse galloped forth, he leaped out back onto the saddle and steered them wide.

The truck slowed and died and when McCree passed it, he glimpsed its driver watching him with what he could only assume was some semblance of robotic perplexity. 

The next vehicle was another jeep. Two omnics inside, a driver and… something else. This new machine was larger than the others, its plating more dense, its eye somehow more red and vicious than anything that came before. It rose up from the back seats staring into him and hulked there like a great black bear. Its two arms became four then six as limbs slid from its torso. Each of those half-dozen fists clutched an assault rifle or a baton or an explosive. It planted a metal foot on the jeep’s rear bar and drew up beating at its chest in a seven-foot mammoth display of steel and animosity. The jagged line of its mouth seemed to grin as it pointed McCree out and nodded, daring him to come closer and face this mechanical warrior of warriors in combat. Its crimson orifice pulsed with yearning for a challenge, the ultimate battle, man versus machine.

McCree shot the jeep’s tires out and it veered off into a rock and exploded.

He rode on. There were only two vehicles left of this now skeletal convoy. The jeep out front with Widowmaker and her rifle, and a final truck that separated the sniper from McCree. The flap had already been drawn back on it. Shadowed inside, Gabriel and Sombra. The reaper stood like the apparition he was, silent and vigilant. Sombra sat on the floor, hands locked together in cuffs at her waist. When her eyes found McCree, she gaped and began to stand until Gabriel’s foot kicked her back into place. The reaper walked to the end of the truck and peered out. He raised a shotgun and McCree had no choice but to fall back a bit out of its range. When he had, they sprung their trap.

Widowmaker came sailing up over the front of the truck, propelled by her grappling hook. She floated into the pale morning sky and pinned against it with her rifle trained on him and her eye sighted down the scope. McCree had no cover. At her apex, her absolute weightlessness, she let her shot fly. He could only throw up his metal arm and brace himself. The bullet drove right into its bicep, rocketing the arm backwards where it barreled into his chest and stole all his breath in the collision. The impact threw him from the saddle. He collapsed breathless into the dust and dirt and rolled painfully a few feet and then lay panting, trying to work the now-defective fingers of his mechanical arm. Wires hung from it like viscera. He still couldn’t breath. Faintly, he spotted Widow drawing up the killing blow on him from atop the truck and a gunslinger’s instinct made him roll to the cover of a nearby rock. The bullet chewed dirt as the world filled with the deafening noise of its blast.

McCree lay on his back beneath the hot Mexican sun, collecting himself and cradling his useless arm against his torso. The metal fingers at its end would not work. Cursing, he used his one good hand to fumble through a reload of his revolver then peaked out around the rock. The truck had slowed and was coming back around in a wide arch, coming to finish the job. He spat blood and got on his belly, eyeing down the revolver’s sight to watch the approach.

They came right for him. Widowmaker remained perched on the roof, sighting him down her scope, daring him to move from his flimsy cover. McCree peaked a little too far out and she fired. He flung his head back in time to watch a chunk of the rock evaporate when her shot found it. Debris rolled the earth in a shower of pebbles. She fired again and the top of the rock was shaved clean off. McCree ducked and kept low and listened as the truck made its approach. It swung around the right side and he had no choice but to belly roll towards the left, desperate to keep the rock between him and his assassin. His entire chest ached where it’d taken the brunt of impact earlier and his useless metal arm dragged like a toy. The truck circled around and another sniper shot kissed the dirt just beside his legs as McCree scrambled.

They danced that way for nearly two full rotations. The truck circled and McCree circled with it until he had a shot lined up on the omnic driver. He fired and the bullet took the machine in its throat. It sputtered and fell dead and the truck moved out of control until Widowmaker was forced to slip herself inside the window and kick the omnic out of the way to take the wheel. She righted their wild course and circled back around.

Hooves clopping commanded McCree’s eyes eastward, where the horse was galloping back for him. He grinned.

“That’s a god damned good horse.”

He tucked his fingers between his lips and signaled the beast with a sharp whistle. The horse neighed and came barreling for his position and when it neared McCree grabbed the reigns with his good hand and tucked his foot in the stirrup. He threw himself back atop the saddle and got them turned around just as Widowmaker took the truck off in retreat. McCree spurred the horse and followed.

He gained ground with every gallop till he was back in range of the truck’s rear. Sombra and Gabriel were tangled up in the back fighting one another. With her cuffed hands, the nameless woman was losing. McCree spurred harder until he could lean forward and got hold of the safety bars protruding from the truck’s side and swung himself in.

Gabriel reared back at the sound of his landing and raised a shotgun. Sombra jumped on his back and pulled the chain of her cuffs around his neck. They went spiraling in a fit, the apparition driving his clinging attacker into the walls of the truck with enough force to leave dents. McCree charged in himself and got hold of Gabriel’s shotguns to pry them away. The reaper kicked him back and then flung Sombra over the top of his head. Her weight barreled into McCree and they both went tumbling down. 

Gabriel moved in for the kill. McCree scrambled up and charged him. They collided against the front of the truck and Gabriel’s shotgun went off, tearing a hole through the roof. McCree was deaf and reeling and before he could recover, Gabriel was shoving him backwards with a hold on his shirt collar. They wrestled all the way to the back of the truck where Gabriel tried throwing him out. McCree held on. Their balance teetered and teetered again and then spilled them both out over the truck’s edge and into the barren lands of Mexico in a free fall.

They hit the ground hard in a tumble amidst each other’s arms. Dust and rocks rained all around them in a shower of agony that left them blind. Even then McCree was hitting his old mentor with his one good fist. When they rolled to a slow halt, though, it was Gabriel with his two working arms and decisive advantage that ended up on top. Somewhere in the chaos, both his shotguns and McCree’s revolver had vanished. Gabriel’s gloved hand curled into a fist like a black hole and drove itself across McCree’s jaw. Blood spat in a long line away from his mouth. Another punch blacked his vision. Another rattled his head. Another. Another. Another.

McCree could barely see, barely think. Everything was numb and wrapped in dark curtains. He was beaten into a pulp and could only muster the faintest of defenses by clawing up at Gabriel’s cloak with his one working hand. Gabriel tossed the attempt aside and hit him again and McCree lay still, breathing in a pool of his own blood.

Noises, faint and mute as if played from an underwater speaker. The truck returning. Sombra yelling. Widowmaker’s voice. Gabriel’s in return. McCree groaned and rolled onto his side and coughed and watched blood spray the dirt. He groped weakly for nothing and Gabriel kicked him in the jaw to still him. When he was able to look up and peek out of the swollen craters that were his eyes, he was staring down the barrel of Gabriel’s shotgun.

“Jesse.” The reaper’s voice, dripping like molten lava from his mask. “I told you I’d see you again.”

He stared. A raspy sound leaked from his throat. Blood trickled from both nostrils. Every breath stuck needles of pain into his chest. His failed mechanical arm twitched uselessly beside him.

“Do you remember the day I took you away from the Deadlock Gang, Jesse? You were just a teenager. I could’ve killed you that day. You’d robbed a bank with your little friends and I had you just like this, with my gun in your face. And I let you go. Do you remember what I said to you that day?”

McCree spat blood. “Told me… not to throw away my second chance…”

Reaper nodded. “You didn’t listen.” He pressed the shotgun to McCree’s face and his finger yanked back on the trigger.

“ _No!_ ” Sombra’s voice. McCree could barely keep his eyes open to glimpse her rushing up with her cuffed hands and throwing herself over him to shield him. “Don’t, Reyes! If you kill him I’ll go to my grave without ever telling you what Overwatch knows and what I know about them. You have my word on that. But if you spare him… I’ll talk. I’ll tell you everything.”

“You’ll tell us everything regardless.”

“No, Reyes, I won’t. You’ll torture me to death long before I tell you a single thing.”

Gabriel stared at her. Sombra stared back, her arms fanned over McCree’s fallen and semi-conscious body in protection. The reaper was still for a long moment before heading back to Widowmaker.

Briefly, they were alone, and Sombra cradled his head against her thighs and stared down at him.

“Why, McCree? Why did you have to follow me?”

He was slipping in and out of consciousness at that point. She brushed back his hair and leaned down and kissed him on the forehead.

“Stay with me, vaquero.”

He wanted to answer. He wanted to say something brave, something strong, something charming. He wanted to tell her everything was going to be alright, that he’d figure this out. He wanted…

His wants suddenly didn’t matter so much anymore. His eyes closed and he coughed one last mouthful of blood that wracked his entire being in agony and then he was slipping, plummeting into the depths of an absolute blackness that smothered all thought and pulled him deeply into the void. Falling, falling. Going away to a distant world where no light had ever reached.

 


	10. Chapter 10

See the boy run. He rides horseback without fear or purpose into an endless horizon and he goes with haste and intrepid spirt. He is a relic born from the past seated beneath a caramel sky that drips to the world in thick globs of sepia light. See the boy watching. From the mountainous lands in his periphery rises a tarantula over the peaks with stained periwinkle fibers grown out of its legs. It walks across the earth leaving craters twenty feet deep with every step of its daggered feet. Its stinger slides from its belly and pierces across all that distance with impossible speed and penetrates the boy through his heart. See the boy laid flat. He breaths air that isn’t there. He watches shadows coalesce from vague patches upon scorched earth and assemble into beautiful curves in which he desires to hold. He reaches but finds only the ineffable, only the intangible, only the shadows. See the boy dying. Black clouds moving on treadless tracks. Clap of thunder. A skulled face amidst the cirrostratus with opened maw that lowers to drink of man and land alike. See the boy wake.

 

McCree opened his eyes. The room around him rose in dim grey slates, a ten by ten foot coffin. He coughed and tasted blood on his tongue. Everything felt swollen and used. He blinked and looked up and saw his hands manacled above his head, tethered to the ceiling. He made himself breath and shifted on feet of lead and stretched in his restraints. Every part of him hurt all at once and nearly collapsed him. He hung from his manacles and leaned forward panting.

The clicks of her high-heeled feet coming from behind him, the only sound left in the entire world. He raised his swollen eyes to look upon her and glimpsed some hideous mutant, some hybrid creature of woman and spider alike. He blinked and then she was just the widow maker.

“Bonjour.”

McCree groaned in reply. His left arm still housed no feeling or functionality. He glimpsed upwards to see the wires and failed mechanics hanging from its bicep like some half-beaten piñata. He coughed again and spat blood on the floor. Widowmaker looked at it without expression. He watched her, ribs aching with each breath drawn. Their eyes met and for a long while only the tacit threat of the woman’s expression was exchanged between them.

“Do you know why I look this way?” She held her bare blue hand out and fanned her fingers, wiggling them to draw his eye.

He looked her over. Her shapely legs, thin waist, the curves of her chest pressing form into her bodysuit.

“Hell, I don’t know. A good diet and plenty of exercise?”

Her stare was mirthless. “My skin looks this way because my heart rate has been modified. It never rises from a slow, steady pounding. As a result, I feel nothing.” Her eyes pale yellow and piercing, like sunlight focused through a magnifying glass. The slightest hint of a smirk upon her full lips. “It makes me very good at hurting people.”

She moved aside and McCree saw the device for the first time there laid innocuous upon a table. A metal box with gears and levers and cylinders pumping like pistons. Anachronistic, like him. From its belly drove two tubes. The first ran into a dial of sorts. The other forked off and became twinned rods with rubber grips and needles protruding through the tips. Their pointed ends shone bright and sharp against the dusty glow of the lightbulb overhead. 

McCree pursed his lips and nodded. “Well, alright.”

Widow took the dial in her hands and moved it and the device crackled to life and breathed a low interminable hum into the small confines of the room. The sound sat in every crack, in every nook, in every shadow. Then she swapped the dial for the rods and stepped into him. Without hesitation she jabbed his naked chest. Every muscle in his body tensed, every vein surfaced like a road map across his skin. His eyelids squeezed shut and stayed that way. His teeth felt loose in their sockets. No breath could be drawn against that penetrating cold fire of electric hell.

It went on for either a moment or an eternity and when it stopped, McCree collapsed as much as his restraints would allow and gasped air that tasted of spoiled fruit. He looked down and saw two sear marks on his chest, smoke tendrils lifting in ghastly trails from impact. He could smell the faint and repugnant scent of his own burnt flesh. He swallowed and licked his lips and looked up into the blue woman’s emotionless eyes.

“Ain’t you supposed to ask a question first?”

“This isn’t an interrogation. We know who you are, and we’re aware of how little you know.”

“Good for you, but I’m still alive, ain’t I? Got to be a reason.”

“We’re trading you.”

“For?”

“Your friend. The old soldier.”

“Jack? The hell you want with Jack?”

“His life.”

McCree had to laugh.

“Honey, if you think this here old beat-up cowboy you’re cookin’ with them rods is worth a ‘Commander Jack Morrison’ to Overwatch, I’ve got some bad news for ya. You might be able to trade me for an ‘Overwatch’-branded jacket or maybe a nice hat, but not much else.”

“If I were you, I’d hope you were wrong about that.”

“If you were me, you’d be one ugly woman.”

She prodded him again. A stream of pure agony tunneled from his belly up into his head and blotted all thought. He clenched his teeth so hard he thought they might shatter. Every inch of him convulsed against the electricity wracking across his flesh, consuming him in blue flame. She stopped and he sagged again, fighting to keep his eyes open and draw breath. When he felt strong enough to speak again, he could only think of one concern to voice.

“Where is she?”

“Sombra?”

“Yeah. Sombra.”

The slightest hint of a blue smirk on those blue lips. “If I said she was dead?”

“Then I’d say you’re a liar. You could’ve killer her a long time ago but you wanted her alive for something. So you want to try a different answer?”

The spider’s reply was to lift the rods before his eyes. McCree didn’t bother looking at them. He stared across them, through them, and held the woman’s pupils. He made her see the gunslinger in him, what was left of it at least, and even the skeletal remnants of that warrior of old knew no fear. 

The moment stretched till it didn’t then Widowmaker simply packed her torture kit back up and left. McCree only let out his breath once she’d gone. Omnics came for him not longer after. They released him from his manacles and dragged him to a cot in the room’s corner. He was laid out there, and even the soft canvas of the bedding was torturous against his beaten and electrified body. When his machine guards left, he made to stand and found it impossible. Every hurt he’d picked up along the way in this wild adventure of his came screaming alive and he collapsed in a fit of winces and pants. He watched the ceiling, sucking air like it was in short supply. A silk web decorated one shadowed corner of the ceiling. It’s crafter maneuvered along those taught lines on fine legs. He had to laugh, but even that simple act wracked him with pain and it was with that pain he drifted into a long and dreamless sleep. 

The second day of his imprisonment, Widow came again. There was less banter in this ‘round’. He was simply wrestled back into the manacles by omnics and then left strung up for the spider to torture him. She did so, true to her word, without interrogation, wearing her icy indifference like a badge of pride as she watched him twist and convulse against the electric claws of her device. When it was over, she packed up and left and his guards put McCree back on the cot. The previous day’s rest hadn’t done him any good. He hurt more this second time somehow, and when he slept, it was fitful and broken up by phantom rods of cold fire jabbing him in the dark.

The third day mimicked the second. Spider, manacles, pain, rest. It was routine by then. The only difference was the bit of food and water he was given to keep him alive. Gruel, as far as he could see. Looked like toothpaste mixed with dried paint flakes and tasted about the same. He shoveled it down nonetheless. He had no intention of dying in this room. Fourth day came and went. He’d stopped talking by then. Saw no point in it. The fifth day hurt for no particular reason other than his body was losing endurance from poor food and lack of physical activity. It was rough, but nothing compared to the hell of the sixth day. That one really hurt.

And on the seventh day he opened his eyes to Sombra.

His voice was hoarse with rust. “Am I dreamin’ this?”

She shook her head. A profound sadness nested in her pretty eyes and refused to take flight as she looked him over. Her hand cupped his cheek, her thumb stroking softly against his stubbled chin.

“I’m sorry, vaquero. For… everything.”

“How are you here?”

“They sent me in. I believe they want me to see what they’ve done to you. What they’ve reduced you to. If I’m correct, they’ll use this against me to extract any last ‘secrets’ they think I’m hiding. They’ve tortured my body, now they want to torture my mind.”

He looked her over. She was banged up a bit but not physically decimated like him. She was in soft cotton prison garb and her hands were shackled together.

“How do I know you ain’t lyin’? How do I know you ain’t been with them the whole time and this is just another part of your game?”

“You don’t, McCree. And, believe me, that’s what hurts the most.”

“I don’t know, darlin’. ‘Hurts the most’ has stiff competition with metal rods spittin’ electricity into your chest on the daily.”

“I begged them not to torture you. I swear.”

“They didn’t listen.”

“No. Clearly not.”

He held her eyes. His world had been all drab greys inside these four walls for the last week. It made those blue wells of hers look bright and radiant as polished jewels comparatively. 

“Pain’s pain, darlin’. I been through it before, I’m sure I’ll go through it again. Someday, this room’ll just be a memory, and memories don’t hurt.”

“Some do.”

“Yeah, well… I guess some do. But this one won’t. The pain that’s gonna last is you and your damn lies. So once, just once, be honest with me. Are you working with Talon.”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I manipulated you to get into that Overwatch facility. I admit it. And I’m sorry for it, vaquero. I needed to extract information. I needed to know where Talon’s Mexico base was.” She smiled bitterly and glanced around the room. “Ironically, I’m right where I intended to get to all along.”

“Why?”

“Because they they have something I want here.”

“What?”

Her lips pressed together.

“Fine. Don’t tell me. Hell, I don’t even care. I’ve got a better question: how are we gettin’ out?”

“We aren’t. Well, I’m not.”

He watched her.

She sighed and ran her fingers through his hair. “They’ll torture me for information. They’ll torture _you_ to get to me. And when they think I’m dry and all my little secrets are dug up, they’ll kill me. I’m never leaving this place, McCree. You might if your soldier friends come through. But me… this is my grave.”

“No.” He made to sit up and everything in him hurt. He fell back to the cot and Sombra came with him, cradling his head, tenderly gripping his forearm. “I’m banged up. But I ain’t lettin’ no one die here.”

“A true vaquero to the very end.” She smiled, leaned, found his bottom lip with her own. Her kiss was soft and sweet as fresh flowers. Had he the strength, he would’ve kissed back. As it were, he could only lay and pant, feeling more useless than he had in his whole life. “Don’t waste your energy, McCree. There’s still a chance for you if Overwatch-”

“Overwatch ain’t comin’ for me. Hell, I’ve turned ‘em down so many times over the years I think of us as scorned lovers. I’ve only got one friend left among them, and she ain’t got enough pull to start a damn war. If this is your grave, shit, then it’s mine too.”

“What’s that makes us then, vaquero? A pair of corpses?”

“Darlin’, I don’t know what that makes us.”

A grin touched her lips. It touched his too, and in that moment all the lies and deceptions were forgotten, and McCree was filled again with the lonely and torturous stirrings of a heart beating too big for its cage. He took her hand and and she took his and when they came together their lips fit just right.

“I wish I’d met you earlier in my life,” Sombra whispered against him, breath warm and fragrant upon his flesh. “I wish our story was a romance instead of a tragedy.”

“Our story ain’t done yet, darlin’.”

She stared into him and a wistful smile spread across her face that made her almost too pretty to bare. “You’re just like mi padre, vaquero. Always the optimist. You’d be a good leader. Like he was.”

“You miss him…”

“Si. I miss him very much.” There were tears in her eyes. He pulled her close with his one functioning arm and kissed her again. And again. She smiled her appreciation and wiped her eyes dry. “I can’t get us out of this room, McCree.” Her hand, warm and on the move across his bare chest, his stomach, lower. “But I can make us forget we’re here.”

It happened fast then. Words were set aside. So was clothing. Her hands explored him and McCree forgot his pain with every delicate grip of her fingers, every smooth expansion of her warm palms. His own hand found her hair, stroking her. Their lips met and came apart and met again. Legs tangled till it was impossible to tell whose was whose. He rose up for her in the only way he could, and Sombra mounted him. She was a Goddess there, all copper flesh and dark hair and supple curves. His fingers gripped her around the soft mound of her hip. Her lips parted and she seated herself over him. McCree gasped and fell flat back against the bed. Then time moved in strange ways. The room washed away. There was only the steady movements of their hips, the quiet sounds of their sharply drawn breaths, the creaking of the cot. Seconds, minutes, hours. There was no charting the passage of time in this warm, wonderful, world they’d set to exploring. At a point, they drew together as one, fingers interlacing, eyes lost in one another’s. It happened simultaneously as if it were meant to be, and in the eternity of that moment all pain receded into a blissful hurricane of which devoured all, of which left only the two of them in that numb void, clasping together to weather the storm.

After, they lay in one another’s arms. McCree watched the ceiling. Sombra watched him.

“There’s got to be a way out.”

“There isn’t.”

“I ain’t dyin’ here. And neither are you.”

“Mi heroe.”

“I ain’t a hero, honey.”

“No? Then what are you?”

“A man who ain’t dyin’. Least not yet.” He braced himself and slowly rose to a seated position. His body screamed protest, but he ignored its wailing and sat anyway. He made a fist with the one hand he had left that still could. She rose up beside him and cradled him gently against her. They sat that way a long time basking in the quiet warmth of each other’s company. McCree was too weak to do much anything but lay back down after awhile, though, and Sombra laid beside him.

He said, “I want to close my eyes, but I’m afraid.”

“Afraid? Afraid of what, mi valiente vaquero?”

“Afraid that when I open ‘em again, you’ll be gone.”

She leaned over him and kissed his lips. His eyes fell closed. The exertion of their passion took a lot out of his beat-up old cowboy’s body. He was fast asleep in a matter of seconds.

When he opened his eyes again, as he’d suspected, she was gone. But there was something else in the room instead, with him, beside him, refusing to let him quit. He sat up, ignoring his pain, and took measured breaths to collect himself. Then, with steeled determination, he made his way to the floor and began a set of one-armed push-ups. It was pure hell, but it made him feel alive, reminded him to fight, and he knew then that when the time came, one way or another, he was going to live through this. For the man had receded.

The gunslinger had awoke.

 


	11. Chapter 11

They came for him when the always came for him. No clocks in this grey tomb that was his new home, but he knew all the same. He could feel the passing of time with some instinctual sense, could mark its place moving through the air. Call it an old gunslinger’s instinct. Whatever is was: it worked.

McCree sat straight on his cot and fidgeted with his mechanical arm and watched the door. Not a minute later the handle turned and his daily visitors funneled in. The spider and her omnic escort, tools of torture in their hands at the ready. 

If McCree had his hat, he would’ve tipped it. “Howdy.”

Widowmaker didn’t respond. She’d stopped humoring him around day 4. It was all business now, and her business was pain. She gestured for the omnics to get him ready and they did. They dragged him up by his armpits and hoisted him to the hook in the ceiling to be manacled and hung. McCree leaned into his left side so as to support his mechanical arm. That one didn’t need any help getting where it was going. Not today.

They locked his wrists, synthetic and organic alike, above his head and took up their positions flanking the door. The spider turned her machine on and its cruel hum flooded the room like a car engine. These were the only moments she showed some sign of being human at all. Just a slight flicker of joy across her otherwise emotionless face as she lifted the rods to prod and electrify him.

“Change of plans today, honey.”

That gave the spider halt. “Oh?”

“You’ve got me cooked to medium-well with those things already. Anymore and I’ll be overdone. You don’t want me all tough and chewy, do ya?”

Her eyes narrowed and her hands moved and he could sense the oncoming pain. He let it come. Give ‘em one and they’ll let their guard down. The rods prodded between the increasingly emaciated flesh of his ribs and bit into him with electric teeth. The world rimmed with black clouds as he shook against the torture. Pain devoured every sense till it was the only thing left in existence. When it stopped, McCree managed a choked burst of laughter and tasted coppery blood on his tongue. This was the last time he was ever going to feel that old sting. Some masochistic part of him even almost grew wistful.

Widowmaker’s gaze narrowed again, funneling her yellow eyes down to two sharp points like beams of concentrated light. She readied the rods.

McCree collected his breath and watched her panting. “Could you take a step back, honey? I thank ya.” He twisted his left side. There were four circular locking mechanisms attaching his mechanical arm to his body. An hour earlier, he’d loosened each lock till it was as its weakest point. Now, even that simple twist of his side detached the arm and he came falling free to land on his feet. The room reacted all at once but McCree acted quicker. He swung his synthetic arm, still chained to his freed organic one, across the path of the omnics and caught both their faces in its arc. They reeled, stunned.

Widowmaker rushed him and the heel of McCree’s boot found her stomach. He stomped the wind right out of her lungs and she doubled over gasping and wincing. The closest omnic had recovered and pressed in for assault and McCree swung his arm a second time, harder now and with more focus. It caught the machine’s metal temple and slammed its head back against the wall. A splay of wires and smoke signaled an electronic end. 

The other omnic charged. McCree slid one of the torture prods off the table and wrenched it back like a javelin. Then he jammed it directly into the crimson orifice acting as the machine’s eye and juiced the connected pain box up. Electricity ran a current into the thing’s head and fried the omnic’s processors. It fell in a fizzling pile, a broken trash heap.

Widowmaker rolled onto a knee and looked ready to pounce and kill like some exotic predator but McCree had the other rod at the ready and its tip crackled with blue and baleful lightning. The spider held her ground and showed her feral teeth.

“Now, honey, if I was half as sadistic as your twisted blue ass is, I’d spend a little time in here paying you back for the last few days. As it turns out, I ain’t like you, so congratulations on that. However, I do need something from ya. And you know what it is.”

The spider sneered. “What if I said she’s already dead?”

“Then I’d say you’re a piss-poor liar. Now get up. And bring me straight to her. No screwing around now, ‘cause I got to tell you I’ve got a _real_ itchy trigger finger after spending a week being probed with electric rods. Pain’ll tend to do that to a fella.”

Widowmaker stared and he could see the mechanics of her mind whirring, searching, landing on the bitter reality of her situation. She did as he said and McCree kicked her hamstrings to get her knelt beside the door. Then he laid his mechanical arm out on the table and unlocked the manacle tethering it to the other. With the limited pieces of the torture box, he was able to fish out a frayed wire and wrap the copper coils around a connecting rod. He juice it up with a hit from the rod just to see what happened and the fingers ran into a fist and back. With a shrug, he lifted the arm and set it back in place, then carefully groped around for the four locking plates till he had them decently tight against his torso.

Two-armed again, McCree tested himself. He could lift the metal arm and move the fingers a little, but it was like moving a hand that’d been frozen solid. They hardly moved and fought him every step of the way. But, hell, it was better than nothing. He went behind Widow and wrapped the chain of the manacles lightly around her frail neck and pulled her to her feet.

“Nothing funny now, honey. I’d hate to make that pretty blue face of yours turn all purple.” For emphasis, he pinched the chain just slightly to show her how easy he could choke her. She glared but said nothing. “Good. Now bring me to her.”

The hall outside was empty. More importantly, there was a current of fresh air moving through it and McCree took deep and gracious lungfuls. A week in that stale cell they’d kept him in had made him almost forget what oxygen could taste like. His legs were all rubber marching along behind the spider. Poor diet was the culprit there. He was weak, there was no denying that. He could only hope he wouldn’t need to get in a real fight somewhere between here and freedom. Beaten down as he was, there’d be no winning. 

He kept Widow close, spying over the top of her shoulder as they made their way deeper into this Talon facility. The place was all stone and rock and stone and rock again. He guessed they were underground somewhere. An occasional tremor ran underfoot and sent the dusting of pebbles that blanketed the place dancing. He could smell ocean water and a faint trace of something burnt. Further, deeper, some cold voice barked orders with machine efficiency and tempo. Shadows fell at queer angles.

“Shit, this is a ‘bad guy’ lair if I ever saw one. Let me ask you, have y’all needed to put in effort to come off this creepy and evil, or does it just come naturally to ya?”

Widow’s jawline tensed. “You’ll die here.”

McCree nodded. “Guess it comes naturally.”

Down a slope of rock. Up another. Around a bend and through a dark chasm. Twice McCree spotted omnics moving along the hall and both times he was quick enough to grab his prisoner and get them pressed into the concealed sheath of the dark. At the end of a long corridor, finally, Widow halted them beside a door. 

“She in there?”

The spider nodded.

“You ain’t lyin’, are you?”

The spider glared.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’.”

He laid his ear to the door and heard noises. A woman’s whimper. The sound lit a flame of righteous anger in him that started in his belly and coiled down into his fingertips. He all of a sudden wished he had something to grab, to squeeze. Something with a polished grip and a six-cylinder chamber, and…

“I need my gun. Take me to it first.”

Thankfully, his gun wasn’t far. Two halls over and Widow led him into a small barred room with a collection of both his and Sombra’s belongings. Strapping his holster on again felt great. Gripping his revolver felt better. He tucked a few spare clips into his waistband and the rest of their things into a duffel bag and snatched his hat from a table as he headed back outside.

“Here, hold onto this for me.” He tucked the hat down hard over Widowmaker’s head so that the brim covered her eyes, ‘blindfolding’ her. He didn’t need her vision anymore, and she was less dangerous without it. “I will be needing that back though, honey. Don’t get attached.” She grumbled.

He’d made his way back outside the door again when the muffled sound of Sombra’s cry leaked through the jamb. McCree grit his teeth and squared his shoulders off with the doorframe. He laid his index finger lightly over the trigger of his revolver. He was weak and starved and aching all over from the torture. If ever he needed to shoot well, it was now. With a breath, he leaned back, raised a leg, thrust his boot heel beside the handle. The locks splintered then geysered away and the door flung back busted on its hinges.

Sombra chained and in the midst of torture. Six omnics around her. Of course it was six; it was always six. McCree looked in upon the scene not with his own eyes but with the eyes of the gunslinger. He could see the action laid before him as if it ran in slow motion. The turning of the nearest omnic. The attentive twist of another. Sombra’s bruised face looking towards him. He could heard the scraping of the machine’s metal feet, could detect the stale air leaking from within the confines of the room that twirled as they spun like a dance. His gun leveled itself to his hip of its own accord. He needed only to look, to watch, to draw his focus down to six little red points. He was a battered and beaten-up old cowboy and the sky was hidden beyond what might’ve been an infinite sprawl of concrete facility… but it was high noon somewhere in the world, and it was under that gilded figurative light in which the gunslinger fired.

Six pops. Six hits. The last shot he’d needed to angle around back of the room, ricocheting the bullet off the torture box itself. The result was unchanged: six bullet casings at his feet, six dead machines before his eyes.

“McCree!?” Sombra wailed, the light of hope washing off the darkness of despair she’d worn.

Muh-Cree. That was how she said it. Like it were two words instead of one. He figured he loved her a little for it, among other things. 

“Darlin’.” 

He thrust Widowmaker to the floor and went to his chained lover. He snatched the key to her manacles from the table and released her wrists and she collapsed into his arms. He took her weight against him and felt her warmth as she breathed and all his pain was forgotten. He was invincible in that moment, holding tight to the woman with no name. The smell of her hair was flowers against his nose. He reckoned he could hold her forever if she’d asked.

She leaned away so her eyes could search his own. “How?”

“Does it matter? I told you no one was dyin’ here. You should know by now, I’m a man of my word.”

“Si. That you are, vaquero. That you are.” She maneuvered around to kiss him on the lips.

Movement in the corner of his eye. McCree spun back to see Widowmaker had slipped the chain from around her neck and was breaking for the door. He untangled from Sombra and took a step to grab the woman, but with the adrenaline of gunslinging gone, his fatigue had caught up with him. He stumbled and fell and her foot slipped right through his hand.

“Shit,” he muttered and clambered up to make for the door. He got to the hall in time to see the spider vanishing in a sprint around the edge of the corridor’s end. “She’s got my damn hat.”

Sombra fell in beside him. “She’s going to go fetch herself an army of omnics to kill us and you’re worried about a hat, McCree?”

“I like that hat.”

Sombra grinned and rolled her eyes. “You’re lucky you’re so handsome, cowboy. Come on. I think I can find us a way out of here. Is that my stuff in this bag? Muy bien! Muchas gracias, vaquero.” She suited herself up all catlike and nimble in her stealth gear again and then fished out a black disc with a blue light rimming its outer edge.

“The hell is that thing?”

“My last EMP. It needs to charge, but when it’s done, I can hit the lights at least. Maybe buy us some time in a pinch.”

“Good idea. Now how do we escape?”

“Can’t escape just yet, vaquero.”

“Darlin’… you ain’t still fixed on stealing that… ‘thing’ or whatever it is they have here, are ya?”

“I came this far, McCree. All of this scheming and sneaking to get here. I’d be a fool at this point _not_ to retrieve it. I swear, once I have it I’ll spend every bit of focus I have on getting us out of this mess.”

McCree stared at her. “…this better be worth it, honey.”

“To me, it is. Now, first-”

“You hear that?”

“Si. I hear it.”

They both turned to the noise. It was moving down the hall like some thundering storm working its way in a corkscrew through the earth. Then around the corridor’s edge, a black flood came rushing through; a black flood of black machines with raised guns and red eyes. An omnic army raining down upon them.

“ _Run_!” Sombra shouted and they did.

It wasn’t easy. McCree’s legs were all rubber again and he was fighting them every step of the way not to collapse. Twice he stumbled. The third time, Sombra took him against her shoulder for support but they were slower in this position, and the flood was gaining ground. McCree grit his teeth and glanced back. He spotted a thick pipe protruding from the wall in their trail and reloaded his gun to put a shot in its belly. The pipe burst and vomited hot steam into the omnic’s path. They threw up their metal arms and moved slowly around it, buying them a little time but not a lot. Sombra tugged at his waist and guided them into a narrow stretch of rock. At the end, a ladder drove up higher into the facility and they took its rungs in ascent two at a time.

When they reached the top McCree glanced back and saw the black flood already rising at their heels. He fired off the rest of his clip down the length of the ladder and chewed off some metal in a firework display of sparks. The pursuit was again slowed but not stopped. The omnics simply discarded their fallen brethren and kept coming. Sombra pulled on his elbow, and McCree was running again.

The path here ran clockwise in a broad circle and the ground underfoot sloped upwards. Dotting the wall were narrow windows that look out into Mexico’s dusty pastel sky and endless beige cliffs. They were high up now and rising. McCree could feel the air pressure changing, the walls of the facility shrinking in around them with each step taken; a hangman’s noose pulling taught against their throats.

“Darlin’…”

“I know.” 

They were both breathless and sweaty then, and McCree knew it was a human fatigue their machine pursuers would never feel. This was a race destined for a loss. Sombra’s feet guided them around a harsh turn into a little storage room. They collapsed on either side of the door and barred it shut, using what sparse furnishings they could find to barricade it further. It wasn’t 30 seconds before the omnic’s pounding came thundering against the opposite side. A slam, another. The wooden locks splintered.

There was one window in the room, but when they ran to it and peered into the waiting world beyond, there was no escape found. They were very high and the ground was very far and the solace of the horizon seemed a distant and remote planet to captive eyes. The door behind them shook against a crashing metal shoulder.

“Shit,” McCree muttered and reloaded his gun and counted off the remaining ammo he head. “Darlin’ I’ve got 18 shots. That’s 18 kills, maybe 20 or so if them machines line up just right to hit two at once. What’ve you got?”

Sombra’s machine pistol housed a single magazine dangling from its underside. Her expression was grim as she looked from him to it and back.

“What about that EMP?”

“Only halfway charged. Won’t work without being fully juiced.”

McCree steeled his resolve with a determined nod. “Well, alright. We kill ‘em till we can’t kill ‘em anymore.”

“What then, vaquero?”

Another crash, another splintering of wood. The door’s flimsy barricade looked ready to burst at the seams. McCree spat.

“I don’t know. I’ll think of somethin’ then.”

“Can’t you think of something _now_ , McCree?”

“Can’t think of ‘then’ now, darlin’, I’m thinkin’ of ‘now’ now.”

Sombra rolled her eyes. “Do you always have to think so much?”

“I think so.”

She smiled at that. Despite it all, he did too. She leaned close and kissed his lips and McCree found himself wishing different lives had found the two of them, different circumstances. In some other world he figured their mirrored souls were entwined lovers free from all these bullets and all this blood. Without the struggle. Without the pain.

“Let’s give ‘em hell, darlin’. ‘Once more unto the breach’. ‘Remember the Alamo’. All that good stuff.”

“Who’s the Alamo?”

“I’ll tell ya some other time.”

A battering at the door. A hinge exploded. The cabinet they dragged in blockade slid back grinding against the stone. Sombra let her arm fall between them and the fingers of her free hand laced through McCree’s. It was his metal arm, so he couldn’t feel anything, but when he looked into her eyes he could also feel everything.

They barricade slid further back. The door came ajar. Black metal parts began filtering through. McCree eyed down the length of his arm and took aim over the revolver’s sights. Sombra did the same. Then…

A static voice in an omnic earpiece: “ _All soldiers to the frontline. Repeat: all soldiers to the front line. We are under attack. Overwatch is here. They brought the monkey._ ”

Sombra raised an eyebrow. “The… monkey?”

McCree spun back to the room’s window and dipped beneath the alcove to lean close. He shielded his eyes with a hand and narrowed his gaze westward, where a funnel of desert dust was lifting like the drawing curtains of a stage play. There, Overwatch emerged.

“Well I’ll be damned.” A grin touched his lips. “Maybe they do give a crap about this old cowboy.”

Jack drew himself up on a jut of rock, his blaze neat around his trim frame. He looked every bit the statuesque hero of legend he once was. Behind him, Angel had him tethered with a blue leash from her staff. The soldiers Jack had been training at their facility swarmed around him, charging for the Talon base. Amidst them, McCree could see Lena down there, buzzing about like a fly, here one moment, gone, somewhere else the next. And sailing through the air from behind them came Winston. He landed hard and put a crater in the desert canvas then launched again and his next landing came into a sea of omnics rushing out to meet the charge. He swatted one aside, tore the arms off another, and kicked a third into a rock where it shattered. He adjusted his glasses.

McCree looked back to the door and the omnics were gone. Sombra was pacing.

“Overwatch…” she growled the word like it was poison moving through her teeth.

“Honey, I hate to be the bearer of good news, but they’re on _our_ side in case you didn’t notice.”

“No, McCree. They’re on _your_ side. I’ll be capture and caged if they get their hands on me.”

He searched for a retort but came up empty. She was right, after all.

“Then…”

“Help me retrieve what I came here to get, vaquero. That’s all I’m asking. It’s at the top of this facility. Once I have it, I’ll vanish… and you can have your happy reunion with your old team.”

“You vanishing is exactly what I’m worried about.” He stepped close and took her hand in his. “Darlin’, this ain’t going to be a happy ending for me unless I get to ride off into the sunset with you.”

“McCree…”

“Just tell me. Tell me if something happens… something that splits us up, puts us in two different places, two different sides, hell, two different _worlds…_ tell me you’ll be waiting for me back at my ranch when the dust settles. Tell me you’ll be there.”

“I-”

“Darlin’.” He held her eyes, rubbed her hands. “Just tell me it. I need to hear it… even if it ain’t true.”

She nodded. “Alright, McCree. Then I’ll be there.”

“Alright.” He pulled her close and kissed her on the lips again, tasting the sweetness of her flesh, feeling the warm radiance of her body as it pressed into his own. He lifted his gun beside them and thumbed back the hammer. Her eyes were lapis and soft and he nearly got lost in them till the distance smattering of gunfire outside pulled him back to reality. “Let’s go and finish this, darlin’.”

And then they went to do just that. 

 

 

 

 


	12. Chapter 12

Like the darkness that was her namesake, she moved as a shadow. Down the hall, soft soles of her stealth suit barely a whisper on linoleum. An omnic grasped for her; a misguided attempt. Nothing catches the wind, and nothing catches the shadow. She darted between two and reappeared behind another, and when they’d cornered her and moved in, her soul slipped back to her translocator in a brief flash of fading colored cubes. Eyes moving to McCree’s. Mischievous smirk. He didn’t need any further nudging.

The hall exploded with the sound of his revolver. Six bullets chewed through the world and took bites out of the machines that would not heal. The things whirred back on mechanical legs and sputtered and died. McCree laid out his hand and Sombra clapped it. They were one hell of a team on this day, in this moment, while sirens blared and forces mobilized.

Outside, the chaotic din of combat roared. They moved to a window and looked out to glimpse the monkey leaping and shocking, batting machines aside as if they were toys. Jack was still charging with his visor down, sending hails of bullets that couldn’t miss. Angela behind him. And somewhere with them, a streaking flash and a peppering of fire; the only trace that Lena counted among their numbers.

“Such heroes,” Sombra said with a roll of her eyes as she watch the fight through the glass. “Tell me, do you long to be with them, McCree? Do you miss the glory of ‘heroic’ combat?”

McCree’s trigger finger itched terribly. Were it a few years ago, he would, in fact, have been down there with them. It would be the cowboy alongside the soldier and his crew that Sombra mocked. 

“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. It’s been too long. Don’t know how to be a hero any more, I reckon.”

“Mi hero es tu, vaquero,” she whispered and snuck a kiss on his cheek. Before he could retaliate, she was off again. Always moving. If some fool were to write up a story on that woman’s life, McCree figured that’d be the title. Always Moving. What choice did a lonely cowboy have but to follow? So he followed.

This facility was structured like an ice cream cone all swirled up to a fine point. Each level they rose, the walls closed in and the hall’s length tapered off, and soon they’d reach the apex, where whatever Sombra sought lay waiting. Or didn’t. McCree still couldn’t be sure if this was all some elaborate ruse or not. Nothing was ever certain with a woman like this. Still, his boots followed after her, loyal to a fault. 

Two levels up, a crowd of omnics choked the path like black seaweed in a stream. Machine eyes glared and assault rifles raised. Sombra disappeared and McCree drew their fire, reloading to send a few shots their way. They closed on him while the shadow made her moves. When she resurfaced, she was behind them and her delicate hand was raised, pointed fingers wiggling this way and that, casting her computational wizardry. One by one, the omnics were hacked into obsolescence. They shorted their circuits and turned to stone and McCree picked them off with measured shots into their black domes. 

Another level up. Another. The walls were tight now, squeezing on them. Outside the windows and down below, the fight was going just as well for Overwatch. Winston had closed in on the tower’s base and was pounding his way through a pair of metal doors. A machine got the bead on him and raised a rifle, but Lena was behind it before it could make another move and its life ended in a spray of sporadic fire from her guns. 

“Cheers, love,” Sombra mocked with a snicker, then pointed the end of her own gun skywards. “Almost there, McCree. Maybe another level or two.”

“And then what, darlin’?”

“And then I steal back what Talon took and we escape.”

“Together?”

She held his eyes. “We’ll see what happens.”

“Yeah. Well. Suppose we will.”

There was more to say, but she was moving again before it could be said and what choice did McCree have but to move with her. He felt like a marionette tethered to the ends of strings, pulled along in a dance by its master. How many others had this shadowed woman of shadowed ways made step just as she saw fit? How many were fools? How many ever learned?

He chased after her.

A floor up and the machines had set up a trap for the escapees. A cluster of omnics lay prone against the floor and walls of a chokepoint and when McCree came barreling through, they drew in like they’d been caught in that pink-haired woman’s graviton surge. Spiraling in on a central point: him. McCree fired frantically, rolled back. While he rolled he reloaded so that he came up with a fresh clip. He fanned the hammer on them, but one had snuck around his backside. Quick as a desert coyote, he slipped two fingers into his vest and slipped a flashbang loose. A flick of his wrist and the creature was stunned long enough for Sombra to finish it with a spat of her machine pistol. The two of them kept on.

They crested the apex of this desert behemoth next, and from up here, the world was small and distant. Sandy dunes chased themselves South, and a stand of grey cliffs jutted everywhere else. What little fight was left down at the tower base was winding down. Angela pulled out a pistol herself and fell a straggler. Jack planted his foot on a writhing omnic and ended it in a three shot burst. Overwatch was back, and it was efficient if nothing else. 

A block of glass rooms crowned the tower. McCree and Sombra took a ladder up and in, and all around them the powder blue sky pressed against invisible walls. Even their feet walked over nothing; McCree’s boot heels clicking crisply against the glass. There were computer stations and terminals, long rows of monitors with readouts and charts, machines humming like choir boys. Two omnics were stationed nearby, watching something. Noise drew them back, but Sombra had her weapon up and blaring before they could do much else. They slumped into two heaps and the woman walked between them, purposefully, determined. A third revealed itself from a hiding place behind a tower of computers. Its surprise party came to an abrupt end at the behest of McCree’s well-placed bullet. 

“Gracias, vaquero.”

“De nada.”

They paced through the first pair of rooms and crossed a carbon fiber bridge that joined them to the next two. Here, the cubes were empty and the wind raked harshly in from the gap near the bridge. The side of Sombra’s head with all her hair whipped and lashed wildly as McCree tucked his hat firm against his own hair and stepped beside her.

“What are we even lookin’ for, darlin’? A computer? A flash drive or somethin’ maybe?”

“No, McCree. Something physical.”

“Physical? The hell they take from you that was physical?”

“Mi corazon. I… McCree! Look out!”

McCree turned around in the direction Sombra’s eyes had blossomed fearfully upon. His revolver was at his hip, readied with a gunslinger’s instinct. And there, behind them on the bridge joining the tower’s two sections, the ghost stood. Hollow eyes peering from a lifeless skulled face. Twin shotguns in either hand. Black cloak clawing with the wind as if it were screaming. 

McCree leveled off his gun and fired.

Gabriel turned to smoke, let the bullet pass through his chest in a liquid canal, and materialized again, none the worse.

McCree swallowed and peered from beneath the rim of his hat at his old mentor. He spat. Over his shoulder, he said, “Darlin’… whatever it is you’re lookin’ for, I’d find it right quick. Let me handle the reaper.”

“Ten cuidado.” She kissed his cheek and hurried off.

“Jesse,” Gabriel’s voice poured forth in it’s dark gravel.

McCree paced forth, ready for a showdown. “It don’t have to be like this, Gabe. Ain’t nothin’ to be gained by tryin’ to put a bunch of holes in an old cowboy. Overwatch is down below. _Jack_ is down below. Whatever this place is… hell, it’s over.”

“Overwatch? Overwatch is a skeleton.”

“Yeah? Heard so are you.”

Gabriel took a step forth and McCree leveled his revolver again.

“Don’t, Gabe. I’m warnin’ ya. This ain’t the old days, and you ain’t facin’ some young buck with no sense in his damn head. I’m the quicker draw, and I may have got old, but you got older. So don’t get in on me with none of that ‘Die, Die, Die’ crap, hear me?”

“I hear you.”

Gabriel shot the floor. The glass it was made of shattered in a hail of pellets and then they were both collapsing with the wind roaring in their ears and the sky tumbling around them. The ceiling of the lower floor came up and smacked McCree in his legs and all sorts of hurt ripped through him. He winced, but had the good sense to roll back. If he hadn’t, his body might’ve been filled with Gabriel’s next shot. As it were, he’d avoided that untimely end. Gabriel recovered, but McCree recovered first, and he dove to tackle the ghost.

The reaper turned to smoke again and McCree went right through him. He ate a mouthful of concrete from the lower floor and turned back wincing. The but of Gabriel’s gun raked him across the jaw. He spun back hard to the ground and dug his hands in to raise himself, but a boot clipped him in the ribs and McCree went sailing sideways. He’d only just landed again when another shotgun blast tore pelleted teeth on him. McCree rolled and they snacked on stone instead. The cowboy fell back on his ass with his revolver hoisted up against his hip and fired what shots he had left. Gabriel went to smoke, closed the gap on him, and materialized with his gloved hands wrapped around McCree’s neck.

McCree sent his boots up into the ghost’s stomach and hoisted upwards. Gabriel flipped over him and McCree scrambled to follow. He cranked his arm back and laid a good one across the reaper’s cheek. Another. A third. He drove his fists down and each time the one made of metal landed, he heard Gabriel grunt in agony. A shotgun came up and fired. McCree threw himself aside just in time to watch the pellets sail past him into the sky.

He clawed at the reaper’s cloak and pulled them together to lay another punch across its skulled mask. Gabriel grabbed his face and shoved him back, drove a kick into his gut that knocked the wind from him, and rolled to his feet. McCree threw himself into a roll too, taking the time to dump the cartridges of his revolver and work in the very last of his ammo from a moon clip. He took aim. By then, so had the reaper.

Gabriel fired first. McCree shuffled back, but a few pellets caught him across the calf and ankle. He winced, but there was no time for pain. He had to dodge a second shot and then a third. In desperation, running out of room, he fired off a trio of bullets. Gabriel became smoke to let them pass through, then solidified to fire again. The blast tore a chunk of stone from the ceiling. It careened off into the wind and went tumbling down the side of the tower raining pebbles from its belly. McCree had to fire again just to buy some time. Gabriel performed the same trick to ensure the shot found nothing but air. Two bullets left, and the reaper’s ammo supply was limitless. This was a fight destined to be lost.

Gabriel seemed to arrive at this conclusion as well. He walked slow now, watching, confidence in each step. McCree gripped his wounded leg and held his revolver in defense from the ground as sweat and blood alike dripped off him. 

The reaper’s voice oozed under its mask. “This is our last dance, Jesse. You are my greatest failure. It’s only right that I’m the one to bury you.”

“Jack was right about you, Gabe. You ain’t nothin’ but a ghost now. The man I knew is dead and gone.”

“Sometimes we must create ashes to grow something new.”

The reaper lifted his shotgun and gripped the trigger.

Behind him and over his shoulder, Sombra stood looking down from the glass cubes above, wind in her hair. She lifted a hand and her eyes filled with fierce fire as she twisted her fingers. Strings of coded lines worked into Gabriel’s cloak and hacked away his abilities. Gabriel look down at his own chest then back at McCree. They shared this fragile moment of quiet together while the adrenaline of combat wound down to meet its end.

McCree fired. The bullet clipped Gabriel in the shoulder. Both shotguns dropped out of his hands as he spun back to the ground, wheezing and clawing at his wound.

McCree looked up to his ssavior and tipped the brim of his hat. Sombra tipped a pretend one in return and vanished back into the glass room.

Gabriel was wheezing like the old man he was under that get-up. He clawed at the stone, dragging himself towards the roof’s edge. Or maybe he was just trying to drag himself away from his past, from the cowboy who he’d rode with in years gone that now stood and towered over him as victor. McCree thumbed back the hammer on his revolver. Last shot. Couldn’t have planned it better himself. But when he aimed, there was no vengeance in his heart. There wasn’t even anger. The limping and beaten dog crumpled on the stone in a black heap inspired only some wistful sad part of him that wished it could all go back to how it was.

“Damn you, Gabriel. How did it all turn to shit?”

Gabriel’d reached the edge, peered over to the drop below and looked back into the barrel of his old friend’s revolver.

“You damned fool, Gabe. You went and walked away from every person in this world who gave a damn about you. Jack and Ang and… hell, all of ‘em. You threw ‘em away. And for what? Tell me. All you got left now is your anger… your hate. You think turnin’ into some lone wold gave you strength but all it ended up turnin’ ya to was a damned coward. You could go back. You could-”

“Who are you talking to, Jesse?” The reaper wheezed from under its mask as blood oozed between its gloved fingers at its wound. “Are you talking to me? Or are you talking to yourself?”

The wind rolled across them, between them.

McCree’s mouth ran dry. He turned aside and spat and then eyed down the iron sight at the end of the revolver’s barrel till his old mentor was lined up just right. In that moment, he saw the truth of it. Here they were, two estranged heroes, two lone wolves, two men who hadn’t been happy in a long time and maybe never would. He pitied the reaper; he pitied himself. 

Gabriel threw himself from the roof. McCree walked to the edge and leaned over. Two levels down, the ghost had landed upon a new roof, and was collecting himself to start in on another leap. McCree leveled the revolver with his eye line. He had a shot, had the high ground, had the chance. But by the time his old friend jumped away again and out of his life, the bullet would not move. It’d sunk in to the metal casing around it and crossed its arms. Even a nomad wolf gone ghost like that deserved a better death then to be shot in the back, McCree figured.

He wiped the sockets of his eyes and climbed the bridge to find his missing shadow.

Sombra was huddled down in the far corner, slunk there like some lost cat. The collar of her stealth suit hiked up high to shield her and her hands were griping something tight beyond the frame of her body which McCree could not see. He walked softly to her, but stopped short to give her a respectful distance.

“Find it?”

Instead of an answer, he heard a soft whimpering noise that was entirely uncharacteristic of the woman it leaked from.

“Darlin’?”

When she didn’t answer again, he pushed forward and sunk down behind her. He took her trembling body in his arms and hugged her against himself so that their warmth was one. She leaned back and rested her head to his chest. His eye line was clear to what she gripped now. It was a photograph in a picture frame. In the still water of its surface, a little girl rode the shoulders of an older man through a kitchen. Both child and adult wore smiles so full it was hard not to smile with them. The little girl had the same lapis eyes as the man, and both of them shared those same eyes with the woman grown who cradled against McCree now.

“Darlin’… this is what they took?”

“It’s the only one I ever had,” Sombra confessed in a quiet and quavering voice. She pulled the photo into her chest, her heart, and held it tight like it might fly away on wings if she didn’t. “They took it from me, McCree. Mi padre. They took him with it. But now I have it back. I have him back.” She kissed the frame.

McCree wanted to say something smart, something that might ease the pain. But sometimes words like those aren’t easily found and he settled instead to share the quiet and hold this strange woman against him; she who had lived as a shadow; she who manipulated all on the end of strings; she who’d chased a photograph halfway around the world just to hold a dead father to her chest once more. This wonderful woman without a name; she of whoMcCree was in damned love with.

The sun settled in the west. It lay red flowers in the sky that fell like snow in the desert air. Behind them, footsteps marching upwards. They weren’t machines. 

“Cavalry’s here, darlin’.”

“Si.”

“Always moving, I guess.”

“Si.”

They rose together and Sombra slipped the framed photograph into her stealth suit. She hugged the cowboy and the cowboy hugged back. Darkness was stealing across Mexico, as it were the cowboy’s soul. Sombra tapped her hip, where a button protruded from a disc-shaped platter.

“Apagando las luces.”

McCree sighed. “Turnin’ out the lights?”

She nodded.

“Well… guess there ain’t much else left to say then, is there?”

“Thank you, McCree. For helping me.”

He tipped his hat.

“Honey, if this is the last time I see you…”

“Don’t, vaquero. Kiss me instead. It’s a better way.”

So he kissed her instead. Behind him, the footsteps rose and rose and now they’d arrived. Doors battered down. Boots on ladder rungs. Jack shouting. Angel placating. When McCree opened his eyes, there was no Sombra. She’d been right: it was a better way. Still hurt like hell.

“Where is she, Jesse?” Jack growled into his ear as his troops swept the area. He grabbed McCree’s shoulder and shook it. “Jesse! Where is she?”

“Who?”

Jack’s eyes hardened. “Don’t be a jackass. The hacker. Sombra. Where is she?”

“Sombra ain’t her name, Jack.”

“No? Then what’s her damn name, Jesse?”

“If I tell ya, you gonna let me walk out of here and go back to my ranch already? I’m an old cowboy, and I’m pretty damned beat up. I’m tired, Jack.”

“Tell me her name. Give me something to find her with. Help me for once, Jesse.”

McCree leaned to the old soldier’s ear and whispered. Then he shoved past, limping where the wound on his leg stung, clutching where the other wounds itched at his flesh, rubbing where the spider had fried him for a week straight, patting at his chest, where the worst hurt of all was somewhere deep inside and not easily mended. Angela tried to stop him, laid her hand out and pulled at him, but McCree was in no mood for anyone. She called him by name and tried again but he walked off without emotion or response. Angela slipped a card in his pocket. He didn’t bother checking what it was.

As he descended the ladder, a massive EMP went off somewhere in the facility. All was dark then and in the shadows, chaos reigned. McCree couldn’t help a grin. There was that at least.

“Jack,” Angela said as she fell in with the old soldier. “What are you doing?”

Jack was furiously typing something up on a projected holo screen, scanning and searching for results on a closed network. “I’m tryin’ to find a lead on that hacker. We had her, Angela. Most elusive woman in the world and we had her. We can’t let her slip away again. Jesse, worthless as he is most of the time, got her name at least. That’s a start. I’m trying to see what I can dig up.”

“He did? What’s her name?”

“Calls herself ‘Gertrude’ apparently.”

Angela put a hand over her mouth to hide her grin.

McCree was gone while the place was still being swept over. He used a soldier’s cell phone and got a cab and took off like he came in; without a convoy or a fuss. Driver wouldn’t pick him up all the way out in the middle of nowhere, though, so he had to hoof it up the southern dunes and walk the desert till he hit road. Behind him, the Talon facility shrunk back to what it was before this adventure had entered his life, which was nothing at all. Every step hurt, though, even the careful ones. 

He was looking back over it all when a neighing pull his eyes around. There, trotting along out of the endless see of the beige sand, the horse he’d taken from Overwatch came forth. 

“Well, shit.” McCree stroked its mane when it neared. “That is one god damned good horse.” He touched brows with the creature, swung a leg up and over, and rode.

He passed out twice on the saddle. There was a lot of pain in him, apparently. More than he’d accounted for. Whatever driver was coming for him was now coming for no one. McCree didn’t even know where the hell he was. Lost in Mexico. That was about the best he could come up with. The skies overhead were dark and foreign and not of any help at all. He picked a star out of the black canvas that looked bright enough and pulled on the reigns to steer them in that direction.

They rode slow together, man and beast, without any real purpose or place. They crested a dune and rode back down and then found a dry riverbank snaking its way across the earth. They rode alongside it as companions to wherever it went. McCree passed out a third time and did not come to for a long while. 

When he did, the sun was coming up and both he and his horse were being pulled into a small town by a child with a dirty face and callused feet. The boy looked up at him and smiled to show missing teeth. McCree blinked and forgot how to return the gesture. He was led through a town square, where swarthy old men sat on porches chewing tobacco and women in dresses carried baskets of fruit. He slumped into the saddle and fell unconscious.

He woke and there were doctors around him, patching him up. He slept.

He woke and there was a nurse tending to him, stitching him. He slept.

He woke and there was a little television in the room’s corner with a news station playing. They spoke fast Spanish that lost him. But the pictures caught his eye. The Talon facility. Jack. Drug cartels. Gangs. Corruption. All tied together by the rope that was that Talon facility. Turned out they’d done some good bringing it down. Done damned good. McCree nodded and slept, this time for a long while and with a deep sense of peace resonating in each breath drawn. 

A whole day passed by before he finally returned to the land of the living. His wounds were starting to close up by then, and for a change of pace, he almost felt alright. They brought him egg whites and dry toast and juice for breakfast and he sat eating and looking out the window at a group of kids playing with a dog.

A man came in not longer after in doctor’s robes. He asked McCree a few questions and charted something on a clipboard.

“Americano,” McCree explained, touching his chest. “No dinero.” He patted his pockets, shook his head. “No dinero.”

The man frowned. “Dinero? No, senor. Es pagado.”

“Paid? Who the hell paid? I…”

Angela stood in the doorway, watching him. McCree sighed and watched back. The doctor left them.

“How are you, Jesse?” She asked, padding into the room to sit beside his bed on a chair. 

“Better. How the hell do you always end up findin’ my ass, Ang?”

“You were wounded.” She smiled. “A doctor always finds a patient in need.”

“Yeah, well, got bad news then. I’m all patched up now. I don’t need ya anymore, doc.”

“Jesse…” She laid her hand on his. His real one. “Why do you always run off?”

“I don’t know. It’s in my nature, I guess.”

“Well… if you’d stuck around, you would’ve found out. We saved this little village you’re in right now. Talon was squeezing them. Using a puppet mayor to funnel money out of here and run drugs through. We put an end to that, Jesse. These people’s lives are going to improve. They-“

“Why are you tellin’ me this?”

“Why? Jesse… because I want you to come back.”

“Come back to what? To who? Overwatch? You? I told you, I’m not a hero, Ang. I don’t know how to be one. I don’t _want_ to know how to be one. That ain’t a life I’m lookin’ to lead.”

“Then what? Where will you go, Jesse? Back to your ranch? Back to drinking whiskey and shooting bottles?”

“Sounds a lot better than here.”

“Jesse…”

He sat up. It hurt, but not so much as to stop him. He swung his legs off the bed and slid them into his boots. He snatched his hat and tucked it over his head. “Thanks for payin’ my bills. But I’ve got to go.”

“Go where?”

“Nowhere.”

He called a driver and this time actually got in when the man showed up twenty minutes later. He stuffed himself into a corner of the backseat and slunk low, hiding his eyes from the cruel desert sun under the brim of his hat. They drove out of Mexico like that, no one talking, no music playing. The engine’s steady hum was enough music, and McCree slept to it.

They pulled up to his ranch very late. No lights were on inside. The moon hung low to the earth overhead, peaking in on the blinds with silver curiosity. A tumbleweed rolled along the empty cattle pen beside the porch.All else was very still, very silent. 

McCree got out and paid the man and thanked him and then watched the car pull off into the night, leaving him alone. He took a breath and stood staring at the dark figure that was his ranch. His boots wouldn’t move, as if planted in the earth. He rubbed his jaw and his lips and fidgeted with his hat. It wasn’t easy to swallow anymore.

He walked up the road and kicked a rock and walked back down it. He glanced at the ranch as if it might’ve left. It was still there, still waiting. He yanked his hat off and ran a hand through his long hair, then put it back on. With a last breath for courage, he got himself moving.

The front door swung back on its hinges and the blackness of the kitchen greeted him. He listened into the quiet. Not a sound. Nothing. More importantly, no _one_.

His head hung low and he ended up at the fridge, a cold beer in hand. He drank back its bitter poison in three quick tips and then set the empty on the windowsill. He leaned against the counter with his eyes on his boots and breathed very slow. His grip was tight enough to hurt his fingers. For awhile, he wondered if he’d ever move again, or if some ancient magic had bound him in place there for all eternity to be glimpsed and pitied; the fool cowboy and his empty bottle of beer.

“Hola, McCree.”

He spun back. 

From the shadows she was born. Dark skin. Long hair pulled to one side. Sleek outfit around a catlike frame. Feet that made no noise. And blue eyes; so blue they hurt his chest. 

McCree’d forgotten to breath, and it wasn’t until long after her kiss that he remember how again. They came together and embraced. There were no words said. In the moment, none were needed. His hand in her hair. Her own peeling back his hat to shed him of his protections. Somehow, they kissed their way into the living room and beyond, into the bedroom. McCree could hear his heart thumping along like an old train. His hands glided so easy along her, like they were meant to be there all along.

Down onto the bed. A creak of springs. Clothes came away and were carried off in the wind till two figures lay naked and vulnerable under the black and silver night. Somewhere outside, a coyote was howling.

McCree kissed her and she kissed back and then they were all tangled in one another atop the sheets. Her breath was ragged in the nook of his neck. His hands were warm down the curves of her hips. A twist, a turn. She found her way atop him, mounting to kneel statuesque and pretty over his world. Then, a lowering. A gasp of breath. A soft kiss as two joined to become one. Everything faded away until they were the only two souls left in the dark.

Outside, the coyote stopped howling and left the night to its peace.

After, they laid against each other, breathing and staring at the ceiling. He didn’t want to ruin this with words, but some words needed to be said.

“I’m in love with you. You know that, don’t ya?”

“I know.”

“What do we do about that, darlin’?”

She was quiet a moment. “We cherish it, vaquero.”

“Cherish it while it lasts, you mean.”

To that, she simply did not answer. They lay quiet again, holding each other and watching the curtains dance about in the wind.

“Are you alright, McCree?”

“S’ppose so. Just a little restless is all. Tired, but scared to close my eyes.”

“Scared because…”

“You ain’t gonna be there when I open ‘em.”

She kissed him deeply and laid her head on his chest. He lay fighting his own eyelids for as long as he could and then they won out and closed up on him anyway and he drifted off to a long and unbroken sleep.

When he opened them again, she was gone. 

McCree sat up in bed and swung his legs off. The sun was coming up outside the window. The house was very quiet and very lonely and he didn’t move for a long time. Then his eyes found the place on the nightstand where his hat should’ve been and found it missing. In its place, a note. He shook his head. Her and her damned notes.

He lifted it and read: ‘ _Vaquero, took your hat for something to remind me of you. Hope you don’t mind. I’ll leave something in return. It’s on the back of this paper. Don’t share it; it’s just for you. Love-‘_

He turned the paper around. Written on the other side was a single word. It was a name. He stared at it a long time and then he smiled and brought the paper to his lips and kissed it. He got dressed and put the note in the breast pocket of his shirt and held his palm there over his heart. His eyes turned to the window, and to the winds beyond that roamed the earth with restless legs.

“Darlin’… you are the woman with no name… no more.” Then he spoke her true name just to hear what it sounded like. It rolled from his tongue like music.

Not long after, he went out on the front porch and stood staring at the sunrise. It was coming up strong today. Bright. It seemed the story of all mankind was told in that dawn light. All the pain; all the loss. And who to guide it? Who to steer it? Who to make sure it kept coming up even when the night was long and the dark suffocating? Slowly, his hand dug Angela’s card from his pocket and he turned it over and over in his fingers. Then he dialed up the number on his phone. He pressed the receiver to his ear and listened to it ring.

“Hello?”

“Ang…”

“Jesse?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“What-“

“Did you get the spider?”

“Widowmaker? No. Unfortunately, she escaped the facility.”

“Gabe too, I reckon.”

“Gabriel too, yes.”

He took a breath and let his hand fall to his hip, where his revolver lay holstered and waiting.

“…I got conditions.”

“Conditions?”

“Yeah. Conditions. I don’t want Jack callin’ me ‘kid’ anymore. I hate that crap. And I want a new hat. Lost my old one. You can brand it if you want so everyone knows whose team I’m playin’ for. Don’t matter. I’d like a room with a view. Somewhere I can see the sunsets and all that. Cold beer on hand, of course. And I want to go back to that Mexican village. Thank ‘em proper and make sure there’s no other shady business going down we might’ve missed.”

“Jesse… are you telling me you’re coming back to Overwatch? For good?”

He grinned. “What’s that saying Lena’s always goin’ on about? The world and… more heroes? Somethin’ like that?”

There was a pause on Angela’s end. Then she said, “Welcome back, Jesse.”

“Yeah, well…” He looked around at his ranch. “Wasn’t doin’ much anyway, I guess. I’m gonna ride out this afternoon. I’ll be seein’ ya soon, Ang.”

After the call he went and polished up his best revolver. He slid the old one out of its holster and the new one in, then practiced drawing it up as fast as he could. He shined the spurs of his boots. He worked his belt buckle with the initials ‘BAMF’ around his waist. He lit a cigar and puffed and watched the smoke drift up into the sky with a wistful warmth touching the corners of his lips. 

He rode out on an old mare from the stables at high noon. His gun bounced atop his hip. His hair, unbound by the hat his shadowed love had taken, ran wild behind his head as the wind raked through it. His spurred boots lay in their stirrups, and the reigns of the animal clutched tight in his grip, real and metal hand alike. He squinted into the light of the afternoon, where gold sun spread before him like a flood. The future lay before him uncertain… but hopeful.

This was a good ride, the first good ride in a long time for Jesse McCree… fool of fools, gunslinger of old. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	13. Epilogue

_Six months later…_

 

The saloon at sundown was a thing straight out of some fancy painting. Sloped tile awning over a wooden porch, dented and nicked in all the right places to give it a little character. Red and gold winks in the window panes. Horses and vehicles alike steered around side to wait patiently for their owners. McCree stood before it all with his poncho sailing off his side in an easterly wind. He took a breath and tucked his thumbs under the rim of his belt and he waltzed up slow to push through those vintage pine entryway which swung inwards; gates of heaven; gates of hell.

Saturday night and loaded up like a revolver with a full clip. The crowd had a busy din to it, a chatter, and he could smell peanuts and cigarettes and cold beer sipped from colder mugs. McCree sauntered through to perch himself on a barside stool. He wanted to avoid eyes, but avoiding eyes wasn’t easy these days. It didn’t take long. He’d only just raised two fingers and flagged the bartender his way when a woman hit him with the shrill alarm system of star-struck youth.

“You’re Jesse McCree!”

Then it was the circus. They came to him in droves. Six months of work with Overwatch and he was damned near a celebrity, especially in little places like this in West Texas. He’d learned the gestures by now. Smile here. Nod there. It all washed over him and he knew just his role to play. He shook a man’s hand and signed another’s autograph. Two girls that couldn’t have been more than fresh out of high school giggled and snapped photos of him. An old timer with a grey beard stayed back with elderly patience till a lane cleared and then pushed forth.

“I have to thank you, sir.”

McCree waved a hand. “‘McCree’ suits me just fine, mister. Save the ‘sir’, if it don’t trouble you much.”

“You saved our ranch. Hell, you saved a lot of things around here. When you and them Overwatch fellas came in last month and ran out those omnic bandits? Well, shit. I ain’t think I could ever feel so damned proud of another Texan. You do good work, hoss. Damn good work. I just needed to shake your hand is all.”

The man extended his palm and McCree took it and looked the man in the eye. A pride swelled up there and he muttered his gratitude before disappearing back into the crowd. A few more stragglers came along and McCree stayed as amicable as he could. When the crowd dispersed again, his beer was on the counter before him.

“On the house. No charge for heroes,” the bartender said with a wink and McCree didn’t quite know what to think of that. Still didn’t feel like a ‘hero’, he guessed. Just a man doing what he had to.

He swiveled around on his stool and leaned back to prop his elbows atop the bar. He dipped his head low and took a swing and let the cold poison work down his gullet as he eyed the patrons of the coming night with a distant look. At a table near to him, a man and woman held hands and said things he couldn’t hear and then the man pointed to distract the woman. While she looked away, he snuck a kiss on her cheek and the two of them started laughing hard. Through the saloon doors, another couple entered arm-in-arm, bumping each other’s hips in a friendly game of tug of war. Past them on the porch, another pair were lip-locked as the sun went down around them.

McCree looked away and didn’t look again.

He sat for awhile then, finishing beer one and working in on beer two. He kept his gaze on his hands, watching the mechanics of his synthetic one work. There was nothing for those hands to hold but his beer, though, and so they found their way back to the bottle before long. He was on beer three when a woman sat beside him. He looked over and offered up a perfunctory smile as she introduced herself. He looked her over while she spoke. Blond. Healthy. Pretty. Even had blue eyes. But they weren’t right. They didn’t have a certain mischievous twinkle in them, and that made all the difference. He let her go on for as long as was polite of him, then explained he wasn’t really looking for company. Her mood soured quick after that, and she stormed off. 

“Sorry, honey,” he muttered vacantly, but by then she was gone. 

He took a long breath and felt a little sick. He scooped his beer from the counter and moseyed through to the back of the saloon, where another set of swinging gates opened on a back porch. His boots creaked softly over the wood and otherwise there was no noise out here. It was quieter, lonelier, darker. It was better.

He moved to the back steps and leaned on the pillar there to sip at his beer. The sun was almost gone and then night would gobble up Texas in its dark maw. Nights were hard these days. McCree had set the bottle aside save for the night. Then he needed it. He needed something to soften his mind, so that his thoughts didn’t wander off and get him in trouble. 

He stayed like that for a bit, just him and his beer and the sunset. No one came to join him and that was good. Some moments are better spent alone.

When he found his way back in, he made great effort not to look at the flirtatious expressions on some of the women’s faces that spied him. He made a better effort still to avoid looking at the couples. Couples made his chest ache terribly these days, worse than a bad cold. He found the bar and sat down and flagged the bartender over to pay. That’s when he looked down and saw it.

His hat was on the table. Not just any hat. His old hat. The hat that had been taken from him by a shadow. He stared at it and swallowed a long drink of beer. The room seemed to grow very still and silent around him. When the bartender came over he inquired about it. The man shrugged and said he hadn’t seen who left it. 

Very slowly, McCree lifted it and sure enough underneath, her trademark, was a note. He could hardly breath as he read the words: ‘La vida es redonda.’ He read them five times over and at the end all he’d earned was a confused expression.

“Bartender,” he called the man back. “You read any Spanish?”

“A little.”

“What’s that say?” He slid the note across the polished counter between them.

The man read and shrugged. “Life is round? Or, maybe, life is a circle? Something like that?”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured. Alright. Thanks.”

He pulled his newly-returned hat down over his head, left money, despite drinking ‘on the house’, and went out to the front porch and stood staring at the horizon, trying to think over the thundering volume of his own beating heart. He wasn’t ever very good at puzzles and riddles which is, maybe, just why she’d left him one. Always mischief; always moving. The woman’s life in two parts. He walked around side to stroke some of the horses’ manes, looking for inspiration in their dark and easy eyes. Nothing came. He walked back out front and made a little ‘circle’ out of his path himself, watching his boots heels leave rivets in the dusty earth.

“Circles… the heck is it supposed to mean,” he muttered, staring at the ground. His eyes held there a long time, trying to see something that might not have even been there, like those games where you have to let your eyes lax before the hidden picture shows itself. No hidden picture showed up, though. Just the dust. Just the earth. He was ready to simply walk away when the toe of his boot skidded through the circle’s rim. It wasn’t till then he didn’t just look at the circle itself, but at its round path. Here, curve away, then there. From one place to the next till it met back up again. Where it finished… was just where it started. 

“I’ll be damned,” he said and a smile touched his lips.

He was on his horse before the smile had even started to fade. Swung up on the saddle, he reigned around and spurred hard for the road. The wind had gotten all stale on him in this last half year. But not tonight. The wind was crisp, fresh. He could feel it deep in his lungs, rejuvenating him. He felt younger than he had in months, and as he rode off with dust kicking up behind him to wave goodbye, he swore he felt it was a ride right through time itself. 

There was still some light left in Texas when he reigned up to his old ranch a half hour later. In the time since falling back in with Overwatch, he’d sold the place. Judging by the big yellow ‘For Sale’ sign in the window though, he reckoned it hadn’t gone well for the realtors. He trotted to the old post up front to tie off his horse and dismounted. He touched brows with the beast and whispered for the creature to hold tight. The horse whinnied and bowed its head.

McCree moved around back. The ride here was all thrills and excitement, purpose, life. But now it was all real. Every step towards the back hammered that in further. Either he was wrong, and there was nothing waiting back there for him but loneliness and heartache. Or he was right, and… well, and that possibility he could hardly hold in his head. It spun his world around too much. To hold her again. To breath her air. To taste her lips. It was all too damned much. Maybe loneliness and heartache were better for an old cowboy like him, after all.

When he turned the corner, there was no one there. He stood anchored in place a while, just watching. Then he slowly made his way forward and climbed the steps to the porch. He took a deep breath and knew there was only one thing left to be done to close off this ‘circle’. To make it whole. To make it return back around to where it all started. 

He sat on the back porch with his snakeskin boots perched atop the old wooden railing that trimmed it. He watched the mountains out West, the way the clouds lumbered through the peaks and the day’s last light set the horizon ablaze. The only sound in the world: wind whispering across the red earth, quiet enough to sleep to. He leaned back and took a long breath, drinking of the coming night. He’d hardly ever been so nervous. This was the edge of the world here, and he was standing with his toes pressed to it, a long fall ready to pull him forth. 

Some time passed along and the sky darkened and McCree was just about ready to commit his heart to the gentle ache of loneliness when a sound played in his ear. A creak of wood. A settling of weight. There was water in his eyes when he looked over. The wind had ceased to blow from that direction.

He smiled and tipped the brim of his hat.

“…darlin’.”

This is how she says it: Muh-Cree, like it’s two words instead of one, and he loved her for that reason, among many others. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_The End_

 

 

 


End file.
